I am pretty sure that there are many, many happy users of ARIS Express that visit ARIS Community regularly and I suppose that at least some of those have already started to wonder about the noise around ARISalign and how it fits together with ARIS Express.
Putting myself into the shoes of someone who has been using ARIS Express for a while now, I would ask “I can do basic modelling with ARIS Express just fine. Why should I care about ARISalign?”
Let me give you three answers to this, a short one, one from an ARIS Express user that I met at CeBIT and a long one (with screenshots).
Short answer
ARISalign gives you additional capabilities that complement ARIS Express really nicely. You basically get a free project-based collaboration environment that helps you to get a better understanding of what it is that you actually want to model and the ability to discuss and rate your work within your team.
Answer from ARIS Express user that I talked to at CeBIT
“A few weeks ago a few people in my team downloaded ARIS Express and we really like it. It is easy to use, pretty intuitive and offers the right level of sophistication for the modelling requirements that we have. The problem that we now face is that the modelling activities happen pretty disconnected and that there is no central place to store what everyone is working on locally. So now the “ease of use” aspect of ARIS Express actually contributes to a problem as many models are being quickly created but there isn’t a good way for us to share and manage those.
It seems like ARISalign is a great way to address these problems as it gives us a central and secure place to store models, to discuss them and to brainstorm what we actually should work on. I can see how ARIS Express and ARISalign become a great combination.”
Long answer
If you haven’t taken a look at Sebastian’s post on Collaborative Process Discovery, you should.
Apart from project-based working, whiteboarding and process modelling as described by Sebastian, I would like to expand a little on different helpful capabilities that you find in ARISalign.
Inviting project members
After setting up your project, you invite your colleagues and you can start sharing processes, documents or any other kind of file with each other.
As part of the invite you can let them know some context about the project and why you invited them in the first place.
Assigning different member roles
When inviting a member to your project you can specify which role the person should belong to.
Obviously, you can change the role membership later on again.
Project Administrators and Project Owners can:
Perform all the actions in a project including archiving, changing project settings and changing project member roles.
Project Contributors can:
Contribute to the project, for example, by adding stages, activities and attributes; commenting on stages and activities; and working on process models for the project.
They can also fully contribute in the project library and discussions.
Project Reviewers can:
View information in the project, but may not make any changes. They can make comments on the whiteboard and they can participate in project discussions.
Project-based discussions
Have discussions with your team members about your project. ARIS Community members are well accustomed to discussions and groups, so this is nothing new. But here you can have private discussions within your project and you decide who gets access and who doesn’t.
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Project-based file sharing
Share any kind of file with your project members and rate uploaded contents to get a quick overview of what is useful and what isn’t.
Right now I am using this capability to share ARIS Express models with others, but it works just as well for office documents or images.
What is missing?
From my point of view there are still a few things missing to make the combination of ARISalign and ARIS Express a smooth experience:
• Ability to import ARIS Express models into ARISalign (just like we do now with XPDL and .process files)
• Ability to view & edit ARIS Express models in the ARISalign process editor
• Ability to lock an “online” model in ARISalign when it is being downloaded for offline editing in ARIS Express
What other things would you like to see?
