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Sparx EA Model Publishing: From Documents to Interactive Models
Publishing an Enterprise Architect model used to mean churning out lengthy documents or HTML websites from your EA repository. While those techniques served their purpose, they often resulted in stale and siloed information. Today, with Sparx Systems Prolaborate, EA model publishing has evolved into a continuous, dynamic process. In this article, we’ll compare traditional EA model publishing approaches with the modern method of using Prolaborate, highlighting how you can hybridize technical rigor with simple yet powerful visualization to best communicate your models.
Traditional EA Model Publishing: The Old Way
Sparx Enterprise Architect provides built-in features for generating documents and websites from your model:
Document Generation : EA can produce Word, PDF, and HTML documents based on templates. Many EA users create full architecture specification documents or design documents by pulling model content into a nicely formatted template. This is often done via EA’s RTF generator or the newer Document Composer for custom documents. The advantage here is control – you decide exactly how to present the model information, add explanatory text, etc. It’s great for formal deliverables.
HTML Report : EA can export an entire model (or subset) as a static HTML website. Essentially, it converts the Project Browser structure into linked web pages, and diagrams into images, so that you can click around the model in a browser. This is useful for giving a navigable model view to those without EA installed.
Limitations with Traditional approaches:
One-Time Publishing: These methods capture the model at a point in time. The moment your model changes, the docs/HTML are outdated. Teams would have to re-generate and redistribute the output regularly (say after each iteration or milestone). This is labor-intensive and error-prone.
Distribution and Access: Documents might be buried in email threads or SharePoint folders. HTML exports are often on a local network drive or a server only accessible in-network. If someone doesn’t have access or doesn’t know it exists, the published model might as well not exist to them.
Poor Engagement: A 200-page Word document or a raw HTML dump of a model isn’t exactly engaging for stakeholders. It’s overwhelming for non-technical readers and lacks interactive elements. Often, these artifacts end up ignored or skimmed at best.
Maintenance Overhead: As the model evolves, maintaining consistency between the “published” outputs and the actual model can become a project of its own. There’s a real risk of decisions being made based on outdated published information if not carefully managed.
Modern EA Model Publishing with Prolaborate: The New Way
Prolaborate shifts the paradigm from one-off publishing to continuous publishing. Instead of generating a separate artifact, Prolaborate turns the model itself into the published source by providing a live web portal. Let’s look at how Prolaborate changes the game:
- Live Model Publishing: With Prolaborate, as soon as a model update is made in EA, it’s essentially “published” for all web portal users. The model is hosted via Pro Cloud Server and displayed through Prolaborate, meaning the latest version is always online. Giving people browser-based views through Sparx Systems’ Prolaborate is an easy way to publish the EA model content. The heavy lifting of manual publication is eliminated – Prolaborate is constantly publishing on your behalf.
- Hybrid Documentation: Prolaborate’s Pages and Dashboards allow a mix of model data with explanatory text, images, and even rich media. This is where technical meets business. You can present a narrative (like you would in a document) but with live model extracts. For example, a Prolaborate Dashboard for “Solution Architecture Overview” might start with a written introduction (high-level summary), then show a live diagram from EA (technical detail), followed by a table of key components (auto-generated from model data), and perhaps an embedded video or slideshow if desired. It’s a hybrid approach: you’re still “publishing” a guided explanation of the model, but every piece that comes from EA is live. This greatly reduces the maintenance of that dashboard – as components change, the table updates itself.
- Consistent Style and Branding: When generating documents directly from EA, one challenge is making them look polished and on-brand – it involves template tweaking, which can be tedious. Prolaborate, on the other hand, provides a web interface that can be themed with your organization’s branding. The look and feel are consistent throughout the portal. So when stakeholders browse the model or pages in Prolaborate, it feels like a coherent product (not a bunch of exported files). From a marketing perspective, this consistency in presentation enhances the professionalism and credibility of the published content.
- Multi-Channel Publishing: Prolaborate extends your model’s reach beyond its own portal too. With integration features, you can publish model information into other enterprise tools. For example, you might publish a list of approved applications (from your EA application portfolio model) into a SharePoint page or a Confluence automatically. Sparx Systems has demonstrated how publishing models on SharePoint or Confluence is possible via Prolaborate integrations. This means your EA model content can be omnipresent – wherever people look for information, the model’s latest data can appear there.
- Audience-Specific Publishing: In the context of promoting your architecture (internally or externally), targeting is important. With Prolaborate, you can set up different workspaces or landing pages for different audiences. For instance, an “Executive view” of the published model might hide technical notations and instead show business capabilities, KPIs, and heatmaps indicating problem areas – all of which can be driven by model data but presented in a business-friendly way. Meanwhile, a “Developer view” might publish the class models, API definitions, and so on. This targeted publishing ensures each audience gets a slice of the model that speaks to them. It’s akin to writing different press releases or brochures for different audiences, except all are drawn from the same underlying truth.
- Traceability and Depth On-Demand: One of the beautiful things about publishing via Prolaborate is that you can cater to both superficial and deep information needs with the same content. A casual stakeholder might only read the high-level summary on a Prolaborate page. But if they become curious or need details, they can click into the live model content linked right there. Suddenly, the technical depth is available – they can examine the requirement details or see which processes are linked, etc. In a document, you either flood the reader with detail or risk leaving out what someone might need. Prolaborate lets you layer the information: publish the top-level view, but have the details one click away for those who want it. This layered approach is ideal for complex subjects like enterprise architecture.
Comparison Table: Traditional vs Prolaborate
Let’s summarize the differences in a quick comparison:
| Aspect | Field | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Timeliness | Snapshot in time – requires manual updates for new changes. | Live data – updates are reflected instantly online. |
| Accessibility | Requires distributing files or access to shared location. | Accessible via a web URL, anywhere, anytime (with permissions). |
| Interactivity | Static reading; no easy way to query or navigate beyond what’s provided. | Fully interactive – users can navigate the model, search, drill down. |
| Feedback/Collaboration | Separate channels (emails, meetings) needed for discussion. | Inline commenting, discussions, and review features on the portal. |
| Maintenance | High effort to keep outputs in sync with model changes. | Low effort – the portal is always in sync by design. |
| Presentation | Template-driven, can achieve good formatting but manual. | Web-based, consistent UI; can be enriched with dashboards and visuals. |
| Audience Targeting | One document may serve one audience; multiple versions needed for different groups | Tailorable views and dashboards per group or individual. |
| Integration | Not directly integrable (documents stand alone) | Integrates with other enterprise tools (e.g., SharePoint, Confluence, Jira, and Others). |
| Security | Relies on document access control (harder to manage versions). | Centralized access control, with authentication and granular permissions. |
Getting Started with Prolaborate Publishing
From a practical standpoint, to adopt this modern publishing approach, here are some steps:
1. Set up the Infrastructure: Install Pro Cloud Server and Prolaborate, or use Sparx’s cloud offerings. This will publish your EA model to the web.
2. Identify Key Content to Publish: You don’t have to expose every detail at once. Maybe start with a particular model (e.g., the Application Architecture) or a subset (like Services). Design a Prolaborate dashboard for it.
3. Design the User Experience: Think about your stakeholders – what do they care about? Use Prolaborate’s features (charts, matrices, diagrams, text blocks) to craft dashboard that tell a story with the model. Refer below for sample Dashboards.
4. Invite Stakeholders and Gather Feedback: Invite a group of users to explore your dashboards. Use their feedback to refine visualizations and, if needed, enhance the underlying model. The goal is to ensure that when the solution is rolled out organization-wide, the content is accessible, accurate, and easy to understand.
5. Invite Users: Send out an announcement or demo the Prolaborate portal.
