Hi Shiv, The Business Footprint section is populated by looking at what Strategic Plans the project is supporting / implementing. It tracks what is taking place in those plans and applying some logic to determine if the Business Capability is impacted by the Project. This could be Business Processes...

Hi Jason, Essential supports some very basic role-based security with just three roles - read, read/write and admin. These are at a repository level so it's all or nothing in terms of the content. Access is configured in the meta-project when setting up a multi-user environment. In the Viewer (which...

Hi Patrick, Can you provide a bit more information so we can advise? You describe some spreadsheets and scripts... What are scripts? (maybe provide some filenames?) Are the Excel documents specific templates for capturing data or general business spreadsheets? (you could provide a screenshot of the ...

Hi Neil, I think your reply belongs to my "other" post...this one is about installation issues.... Thanks MilesT. Indeed it did. As I mentioned in that post however, it's PlantUML which requires GraphViz. A cross platform GraphViz is unlikely right now, Admin-less install might be possibl...

Thanks, We had a major issue with our site a little while ago and have subsequently suffered with rogue links such as these. We're planning to rebuild the site over the next few months which should make finding this information a lot more straightforward. Hope this didn't cause you too much trouble....

Hi

Apologies for extended delay in response to this. Did you resolve this?

Regards

Neil

Answered here
viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1619

Hi MilesT, Which Single User Install details are you reading? The ones at this page http://www.enterprise-architecture.org/documentation/doc-installation/147-installer-stand-alone Seem to refer to the JAR file. Do make sure you have the software pre-requisites installed before running the Essential ...

Hi Vince, You'll probably need a for-each loop. Here's an example which should point you in the right direction... <xsl:for-each select="/node()/simple_instance[type='Business_Principle']"> <h2> <xsl:value-of select="current()/own_slot_value[slot_reference='name']/value"/> </h2> ...

Hi, Customisation takes place in two locations css/essential_configure.css common/ev3_header.xsl There are reasonably good comments in the code of both pages to assist with the customisation. Basically, the CSS file will set 99% of what you want (logos, colours, etc) and the XSL has an option for a ...

Hi, The PDF export is part of the DataTables "TableTools" extension which we are not the developers of. Customisation is theoretically possible however is non-trivial. Additional Information can be found via the Data Tables website http://datatables.net/extensions/tabletools/ Or try a goog...

Hi MilesT, Viewer reports are currently built using XSLT and individual reports leverage additional technologies depending on what they're attempting to show. Some views, e.g. Business Process Flows, use third party libraries such as PlantUML to help render the content. It is PlantUML which has the ...

Hi MilesT, Viewer reports are currently built using XSLT and individual reports leverage additional technologies depending on what they're attempting to show. Some views, e.g. Business Process Flows, use third party libraries such as PlantUML to help render the content. It is PlantUML which has the ...

Hi Dave, These are known bugs that will be resolved in the next release. The Jquery min.map issue is a developer related issue where the .min version of Jquery is looking for the full uncompressed version of the same file. The __history related issue is a minor config option for the roadmap for a fe...

Hi, We've looked into this and it was a very simple older view which showed a rather crude role-based reporting hierarchy for a pre-defined organisation. It uses SVG which we stopped using due to a lack of support in IE7 & IE8 hence we never migrated or updated the viewer into Version 3+. I reca...

Hi,

The Strategic Logical Business Operating Model is no longer included with Essential though I can't recall why it was removed.

I'll discuss this with the team and see if I can provide some insight. In the mean time, we'll remove the documentation for this view.

Thanks

Neil

Hi Dave, We've also heard reports of issues with Tomcat 8. We're recommending (and using ourselves) Tomcat 7 which is stable and works well with Essential. We're not sure at this point whether the bug is at ours or Tomcat's end. We'll look to resolve this for the next release. Your error log will be...

Hi Steve, This is a bug after the class Application was refactored to become Application Family. It's fixed for the next release. I've attached a copy of the updated file should you wish to address this. Simply copy this file into the "application" folder in your Essential Viewer within To...

The default password for the import utility is

username: [email protected]
password: admin

Hi Jamal, We separate the capture and the reporting as two discreet actions to allow us to control the rate of change in the reporting environment. In order to capture your company's artefacts, you will need to start with a blank baseline repository in Protege rather than your current repository wit...

Hi Jamal, Simply copy the "essential_viewer" folder in the Tomcat "webapps" directory and give the copy a new name e.g. essential_viewer_demo. When you publish from Protege, edit the address of the viewer you wish to publish to e.g. http://localhost:8080/essential_viewer_demo The...

Hi Bien, I'm at little unsure of what things you've tried so before we try to offer any more help can you provide some confirmation on the following. The more information you can provide the better... Questions... Do you have full administrator rights to the PC you are using? Is the PC "locked ...

HI, Just in case you're having an issue with the WAR file itself, here is a link to a copy of the essential_viewer.war file. Delete any essential_viewer.war files and any essential_viewer folders in the existing webapps folder. Tomcat should deploy (unpack) this WAR file automatically. Do not unzip ...

Hi, This is quite unusual as we rarely encounter errors with deploying the Viewer. Firstly, I'd check there is sufficient memory allocated to Tomcat. If you installed Tomcat via the installer wizard then you should have a tray icon for Tomcat. Open this up and set the min memory at 256m and the max ...

Hi, Generally, this is a result of the Essential Viewer web application not being available in Tomcat. You can check a few things. Is Tomcat running? Go to http://localhost:8080 and see if you get the Tomcat home page. If not, you need to start Tomcat. Has the webapp essential_viewer.war deployed co...

Hi, We have not encountered this issue previously. Can you provide a bit more info regarding this issue? What Operating System are you running? (e.g. Windows Vista, 7, 8, OSX, Ubuntu) What version of Protege are you using? (Help > About Protege) What version of Java are you running (from command lin...

Hi, I've emailed you directly with a link from a box.com account. Can you let me know directly if this sorts the issue. I've just downloaded the latest version from the site myself and it downloaded quickly and without issue. Perhaps it's a location issue or a proxy / security issue. Thanks for your...

Hi Rick, This slot is used on the PHYSBUSPROC_TO_APPINFOREP_RELATION class. This is located in SYSTEM-CLASS > EA_Relation > Business Relation The idea here is when you create a Physical Business Process (the implementation of a logical business process) you can specify if any information is used by ...

Hi, Not sure this is the answer to the problem but you look like you have a typo (a missing 'x") in your server bat file CODEBASE_URL=file:/c:/program%%20files%%20(86)/protege_3.5/protege.jar Should be CODEBASE_URL=file:/c:/program%%20files%%20(x86)/protege_3.5/protege.jar Can you try this chan...

Hi, The answer to this is "it depends". We have no pre-built importer for BPMN though we do have the ability to import well structured XML. What tool are flows already in? Does this tool have a XML export? Have the flows been modelled consistently using strong semantics for the different a...

Thanks for the screenshots. I'll take a look at this and get back as soon as possible.

Hi srinivas, EAS are able to provide view customisation as part of professional services. You can get in touch view the services menu above or at the link below http://www.enterprise-architecture.com/contact/ Alternatively, if you have someone familiar with XSL development then they will probably be...

Hi, Let’s do a common example for this Application Provider: Resource Tracking Spreadsheet Technology Product: Excel 2010 Product Supplier: Microsoft In this example, the Resource Tracking Spreadsheet is the application used to track resources. The technology for the application is Microsoft Excel 2...

Hi Rick, When you say Physical Process Catalogue, which view do you mean? Can you send a sample URL(s) (can be http://localhost/blah) so we can see which xsl file(s) you're looking at. Can you detail where you're expecting to see the various bits and we can advise. It maybe that you're hoping to see...

Great Stuff. Thanks for letting us know.

Hi, This is defined by creating a new instance on the Stakeholder slot of the appropriate Physical Process. For example... We create a new Stakeholder and choose ACTOR_TO_ROLE_RELATION. We then select the appropriate Actor for the Actor Slot Finally we choose "Process Manager" from the lis...

Can you be a little more specific about when you're getting the error.

Is it when installing / running Protege?
Is it when installing / running the Essential JAR file?

Are the server components on the same machine or a different one?

Thanks

Neil

Hi,

We're currently working on the next major release of Essential and the search functionality will be available then. We're expecting to publish the release this summer.

Thanks

Neil

Happy to help!

That's great news. I'll past the feedback onto the team.

Have you specified the actual Business Processes for the Business Process Usages? 1. Select a Process Object (the corners will highlight in green) 2. Move the mouse over the object until the cursor turns to a finger/pointer. 3. Double click to define the attributes for the Business Process Usage 4. ...

Hi, Sorry but we don't have anything like this available right now. You could probably put something like this together yourself based on our current meta-model documentation. Also, any high-level meta-model would probably be misleading for newcomers. Much of the strength of Essential lies in its ri...

Hi Rick,

You can add a picture by using the upload attachment tab next to options. Alternatively, you can host a picture on an external site e.g. Dropbox and add the image using the "img" tag

Cheers

Neil

Hi Rick,

Can you post a screenshot of a sample process from Protege

Do you have the start and end nodes (black circles) in place for each process?

Thanks

Neil

Hi, There are two ways to relate Application Providers to Group Actors depending on how mature the rest of your EA model is. The first approach uses the Stakeholder slot to make a simple mapping between the two. Create a Business Role called "Application User" or similar and create Stakeho...

Hi, The answer to this question is very much "it depends on your configuration". Can you access the meta-project on the server directly? You can create a new admin from there. Has Essential been set up as multi-user with a database? If so, does anyone have any passwords for the database? S...

Hi,

A quick suggestion might be to try with Tomcat 7.0.

I know many users are using Tomcat 8 successfully however I personally have run into issues using Tomcat 8.0. It might be worth waiting for a later build of Tomcat 8 before adopting that.

Let me know how you get on.

Cheers

Neil

Hi, The integrations we have configured have previously used the XML data file approach with a manual import. This has helped manage testing of data integrity. It is possible to automate this via the Protege API which you can find on the Protege website. We have done similar things whilst developing...

Hi, firstly apologies for the delayed response, this post got flagged as spam for some reason. Did you resolve this? Looking at your screenshot, I can see the programmes and projects all have the * character at the beginning of the names. Is there a reason for this? This may cause the problem you're...

Hi, Editing the meta-model is done directly in the Protege tool. Choose Project > Configure Enable the Classes Tab (ClsesTab) and the Forms Tab (FormsTab). Editing the meta-model should be fairly self explanatory from the classes window. Do proceed with caution. We strongly recommend extending the e...

Hi, Apologies for the delayed response. You need to be running a 3.x version of Protege. 4.x versions are not compatible. Both v3.x and v4.x are current but different products. Many of the development team here use Macs with Mavericks with no issues (in fact usually less than Windows ;) ) Let me kno...

Hi, This type of thing can be caused by Tomcat running out of memory. You can check the log files in the Tomcat installation folder to see if any errors are there. We strongly recommended a second Tomcat installation for the Import Utility (e.g. set to port 9080) and allocating 1500mb of memory. As ...

Hi Colin,

Are you able to post some screenshots and details of the libraries you've used?

You could also share your xsl code via the forums.

Cheers

Neil

Hi Colin, Our apologies for the delay in responding to this. We've missed a couple of forum posts recently as we stopped getting notified of new posts. Hopefully we've fixed this now. Here's how we might approach this particular problem from a modelling point of view. We'd capture the capability mod...

Hi,

Apologies for the delay. This got missed by the team.

It may be something to do with how you have modelled it.
Does the process have a start object (black blob)?
Would it be possible for you to post a screenshot of a sample process flow (from Protege) that is not working?

Cheers

Neil

Hi Colin,

We've added a number of dashboards and reports around monitoring standards compliance but they are a bit too client specific to share as is.

Can you elaborate on what kind of things you might be looking for?

Cheers

Neil
Essential Project Team

Hi Colin,

We'd love to hear more about what kind of things you're doing with Essential and there are a number of ways for you to share with the The Essential Project.

Would it be ok to contact you directly to discuss this?

Cheers

Neil Walsh
Essential Project Team

Hi,

First thing to try is a restart of Tomcat.
Next a reinstall of your Java VM
Finally, increase the memory allocation to tomcat
Let me know how you get on

Regards

Neil

Hi,

First thing to try is a restart of Tomcat.
Next a reinstall of your Java VM
Finally, increase the memory allocation to Protege (under the protege.lax tab of preferences)

Let me know how you get on

Regards

Neil

Hi,

First thing to try is a restart of Tomcat.
Next a reinstall of your Java VM
Finally, increase the memory allocation to Protege (under the protege.lax tab of preferences)

Let me know how you get on

Regards

Neil

Hi, Whilst we believe Essential to be fully compatible with Linux, this isn't something we have tested for quite a while. We'll help where we can. The install file is a Java executable which runs fine on both Windows and OSX. We'll get the documentation updated to reference this. You may need to mak...

Hi

The tool was developed primarily using Firefox and has been tested in IE7+, Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

Possibly a cookie error. Try clearing cookies from your browser.
I'd suggest a restart of Tomcat too.

Cheers

Neil

Hi, It might be worth trying with Protege version 3.4.8 as we haven't done any testing with 3.5 yet. Just to be clear, the phrase "Essential won't recognise later versions of Protege" is not incorrect but more specifically that version 4.x of Protege is a different product to version 3.x. ...

Hi, Two things to check off... 1. Have you tried restarting Tomcat and re-doing the import? 2. What memory allocation do you have for the Tomcat install? We recommend at least 1.5GB memory allocated to the Tomcat install running the Import Utility. Even better would be to run the Import Utility in a...

Hi Vivek, The short answer is it should but currently doesn't. We have a release planned for this quarter and we'll try to get this updated. We are also hoping to update it to support decision points too. It's a view we're aware needs some additional work and we're keen to get it up to date. Thanks ...

Hi,

Unfortunately, the attachment you mention isn't there for some reason.

Can you provide a bit more information regarding the bug?

What view are you looking at?
What does the error say?
Do you have a start and end object on your process?

Thanks

Neil

Hi, This is indeed a bug and we'll have this fixed in the next release (4.1) which s also fixes a wide range of other bugs. We hope to have this out this quarter. I'll also speak to the team regarding the demo repository version and see if we can ensure we update this with 4.1 also. Thanks for bring...

Hi,

We haven't explicitly updated the installation guide but I believe nothing has changed between releases that would change the guide from v3 to v4. I'll mentioned it to the team and see if we can review and update if necessary.

Thanks for bringing it to our attention.

Cheers

Neil

Hi, Thanks for the log details. Can you tell me a bit more about your setup? We have heard reports of some people having difficulty with MySQL6 (though I understand it's worked fine for others). You may wish to try giving MySQL v5.5 a go. Which versions of Windows, Protege, MySQL are you using? Whic...

Hi, Can you tell me a bit more about your setup? We have heard reports of some people having difficulty with MySQL6 (though I understand it's worked fine for others). You may wish to try giving MySQL v5.5 a go. Which versions of Windows, Protege, MySQL are you using? Which JDBC driver are you using?...

Hi Ian, The way Jonathan described will almost certainly work the same way though you may have more steps to go through. Maybe a better way to think about this is to articulate what business question(s) you're trying to answer as sometimes this can trigger ideas for different approaches. Whilst the ...

Hi, The approach you've described is correct. It's actually quite easy to manually migrate Application Providers to be Composites. You literally just drag the Application to the Composite class in the Instance Browser. This doesn't affect anything that's already been modelled as Composite is a sub-c...

Hi Ken, Thanks for your question. We've discussed this here and whilst the current meta-model could in theory capture this, the mechanics of this would be less the ideal. We're proposing the creation of an ECP (Essential Community Process) pack to support this. What we'd like from you are some detai...

Initial Requirement:
by kenarakelian on Mon Sep 23, 2013
"To provide a view showing when a release is scheduled to move into certain environments, what is in the release, and who is effected by the changes in the release."

Hi Ian,

This is a work in progress view which should not have been included in the release. When this view is complete, we will include it with a reference in the release notes.

Apologies for any confusion caused.

Neil

Hi, We opted to use the UML style views to allow users to focus on creating the relationships rather than need to create diagrams. The UML view does auto-layout on the content and means the modeller can put together the relationships very quickly with out concerning themselves with what this looks l...

Hi, Which version of Essential are you using? If I recall, the Service Delivery section was removed in Version 4+. I think it may have used classes/slots not present in the v3+ meta-model. We don't have a view manual for that view. You may be able to derive the slots by viewing the code for that XSL...

Hi, Again, I'm also unfamiliar with this particular JDBC driver. Looking at the logs it appears there remains a problem with JDBC drive installation. Unable to load knowledgebase jdbc:sqlserver://localhost;databaseName=es sentialdb -- java.lang.RuntimeException: class not found: com.microsoft.sqlser...

Are you on Windows or Mac?

Thanks for the feedback. The Import Utility is currently in beta and this is an issue we have been made aware of.

We believe we have a fix for this and it is currently being tested. We hope to have an updated version available shortly.

Thanks again

Neil

Hi,

Demo 3.5 will not work with Essential Version 4.0. You need to download the Demo 4 sample repository

http://www.enterprise-architecture.org/ ... ositories/

Neil

Though we've not used the D3 library directly, we have used other libraries that use a JSON data structure to drive the view. Take a look at the code the the Organisation Structure Model (core_bl_bus_org_structure_model.xsl) as an example. D3 is a great library and works wonderfully for large data s...

Your screenshots indicate OWL/RDF format which Essential does not support. Did you try to convert the baseline repository? To access the baselines repository, open Protege goto File > Open. Locate the baseline repository called essential_baseline_v4.0.pprj (the pins and pont files are also needed). ...

The JAR file should be located in your Tomcat WebApps folder. If Tomcat is running, it should unpack the JAR file and create the new essential_viewer folder. If tomcat is already running then try a restart of tomcat. If it's still not unpacking the take a look at the logs ( [YOUR TOMCAT FOLDER]/logs...

Hi Rick, You can install the Update Tab by downloading the latest version of Essential and selecting only to install the Update Tab from the installer. The Update Tab included with v4 is compatible with a v3 repository. For more information on the Update Tab then take a look at this article. http://...

PlantUML is one of the underlying components used in the Essential Viewer. As such there nothing you need to "do" to use it. It's simply coded as part of the overall Viewer.

You can find out more about PlantUML at http://plantuml.sourceforge.net

Essential doesn't import "diagrams" i.e. pictures though we can link to the office documents using a uri / url. We use the external reference slot on each object to link to assets stored on a file share, sharepoint or similar. Typically, this is a complement to defined models in Essential ...

Hi,

Can you expand upon what you're looking to achieve?
Are you looking to attach pictures of views from visio, powerpoint, etc?
Or are you looking to import data from another source to use in Essential?
Or something else?

Cheers

Neil

Hi Richard, Can you expand upon what you mean by a Technical Architecture Building Block in this context. This will help us provide a more relevant answer to your question. Are you thinking along the lines of configurations of particular technology products, types of technology (technology component...

EAS offer professional services to support these kind of activities. You can contact them from the Services menu above. It's also possible to achieve this via the integration tab. You can see some tutorials for this here. http://www.enterprise-architecture.org/getting-started-docs Do feel free to po...

Hi Jacek,

We'll bring this up as an issue with the Protege team. I suspect the script tab may be using v1.x of Python but I'm uncertain and will need to do some investigating.

I'll post back should we find a solution for this.

Thanks

Neil

Unfortunately, we've not encountered that error before. Perhaps it was some form of corruption or Tomcat playing up. I'd suggest a re-download of Essential and install just the viewer again. I'd also recommend a restart of tomcat which has been known to solve unpredictable behaviour in the past. Let...

Hi Jacek, We have a release planned shortly which should address a range of internationalisation issues including the kind you have described. The problem was mainly that some parts of Essential weren't using UTF8 and we've rewritten thing to take advantage of this. We should have some information t...

Firstly apologies for the delay in responding - this post failed to show in our queue so we missed it. I hope you've made some progress on this but just in case you haven't here's a brief response. Let me know if you'd like some detail... 1. External Repository Instance Reference refers to an id use...

You'll need to setup Essential to run in multi-user mode to achieve this functionality.

We have a tutorial focused on setting this up. You can find it here...

http://www.enterprise-architecture.org/ ... multi-user

Cheers

Neil

Firstly, our apologies for the delay in responding... The mapping of Processes to Applications are derived through the relationship between Application Services and Physical Business Processes. It's much easier to build the relationship if you try this from the Physical Business Process end and foll...

Hi Harshad, Apologies for the delay in responding... I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve here. Can you provide me with a bit more information? Are you trying to create an empty Essential repository? If so, you should look for the baseline repository located in the folder where you installed E...

It appears the online view manual is incomplete for this view and we'll patch this in the next release. In the interim here are the additional steps you need to generate the org chart part of the view For this view to navigate the meta model successfully the "root organisation", i.e. the t...

Hi, Just a quick note to let you know I've taken this question to the wider team to discuss the best approach we'll get back to you shortly. Neither approach you've suggested seems ideal and we think we may have better options for you in terms of sustainability and maintenance of your repository. We...

The training is a paid service offered by The Essential Project sponsors, EAS, as part their professional services offering. They offer a wide range of training modules associated with Essential including standard meta-model training, view development, strategy management, change management and more...