Prolaborate 5.4 Release Highlights

What’s better than one standout feature? A whole suite of them!

We’re thrilled to introduce the suite of features in Prolaborate 5.4, our major release for 2024. As digital business transformation accelerates, enterprises face increasing pressure to deliver solutions in a rapidly evolving environment. 

Enterprise architecture (EA) leaders are critical in driving digital change while ensuring organizational resilience. Sparx Systems supports these leaders by offering solutions that guide transformation through powerful digital platforms. 

We’re focused on empowering EA teams to work more effectively with the latest versions of Enterprise Architect (17), Prolaborate 5.4 and PCS (6.0). This release includes significant new features like the Integration Map, Dashboard of Dashboards, Review Report, and more. 

Let’s explore these new features in detail.

Access Journal entries added by modelers

‘Communicate critical decisions made during model development using Journals’ 

Sparx Systems EA provides a valuable feature called Journals, which is a powerful way to document and share critical decisions made during the modeling process. Journals offer more depth than traditional notes or descriptions. By capturing the reasoning behind each enhancement, they enable teams to maintain a detailed record for future reference.

With the ability to publish this information through Sparx Systems’ publishing platform (Prolaborate), the new feature ensures that important details are easily accessible, breaking down information silos and fostering collaboration.

Introducing this feature within Prolaborate is particularly useful for teams who build complex systems, and complex business processes as it allows both modelers and stakeholders to access and understand key insights, promoting transparency and efficient decision-making.

Benefits:

• Capture and share detailed insights, providing transparency into critical decisions and model enhancements.

• Publish key information to a wider audience, ensuring all stakeholders can access the same data.

• Reduce back-and-forth communication by centralizing decision-making details, leading to quicker, more informed decisions.

Features:

• Read the Enterprise Architect journal entries within Prolaborate.

• Access journals added to objects, such as elements and packages.

• View journals added to diagrams.

Enterprise Architect & Prolaborate Discussions in one place

Are you part of an architecture team that frequently uses discussions in either Sparx Systems’ Enterprise Architect or Prolaborate? If so, this feature is sure to interest you! Prolaborate users no longer need to access two different interfaces to engage in conversations.

In a large team setup, both modelers (Sparx Systems EA users) and collaborators (Sparx Systems Prolaborate users) frequently use discussions, but these discussions often remain isolated. This new feature breaks down those barriers, allowing Prolaborate users to access the Enterprise Architect discussions directly from the Prolaborate. The Enterprise Architect users can also use the Prolaborate Add-in to view discussions from Prolaborate.

This feature is designed for large teams that regularly exchange feedback through discussions. Enhancing discussions in Prolaborate reduces the gap between modelers and non-modelers. Discussions are a core feature of modeling tools, and consolidating EA and Prolaborate discussions provides a holistic understanding of conversations that have occurred over time.

Benefits:

• The enhancement of discussions in Prolaborate helps bridge the gap between modelers and non-modelers.

• Consolidate discussions in one place.

• Reviewers and stakeholders can instantly see the discussions added by EA users in Prolaborate.

Features:

• With Model Security enabled, users can access EA discussions within Prolaborate. 

• Read-only view of EA discussions in Prolaborate. 

• View the Enterprise Architect and Prolaborate conversations together. 

• Access discussions on objects, diagrams, and packages within Prolaborate. 

• Filter conversations based on status. 

• The Enterprise Architect and Prolaborate conversations are differentiated by subtle color variations. 

• The discussion overlay displays the discussion count for both Sparx Systems EA and Prolaborate conversations. 

Note: Have you heard about the Prolaborate Add-in?  Try it if you would like to access Prolaborate discussions in EA.

Access to Enterprise Architect Chats 

The entire globe thrives on the exchange of ideas between individuals and groups. This exchange occurs through various channels, such as forums, MS Teams, and more. Every individual in an organization uses software to communicate about their day-to-day work, making it challenging to find Enterprise Architect related conversations amid many other discussions. In such cases, Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect’s chats play a crucial role in securely holding design and architecture related conversations, allowing modelers and groups to discuss model-related details. However, if I need to access my chats from Prolaborate, I currently can’t do it in Prolaborate 5.3. To address this gap, we are bringing EA chats to Prolaborate, where users can read their chats whenever they need them.

Benefits:

• Easy access to Sparx Systems EA chats via a web browser.

• Refer to Sparx Systems EA conversations at any time.

Functions:

• Model Security must be enabled.

• The user must be part of the Sparx Systems EA model user list.

• To access the Sparx Systems EA chat, the user must log in to Prolaborate.

• Access both group and individual chats.

• Read-only view of chats.

Easily identify and navigate to external data sources

This feature is useful for teams that integrate external data sources into a Sparx System model repository. Prolaborate makes it easy for users to differentiate external data sources in a view, which is critical for architects and modelers when designing solution architectures and similar solutions.

If you are a modeler or stakeholder who frequently deals with external data, this feature allows for seamless switching between applications. You will be able to view the external data immediately. While designing architecture diagrams, the overlay on the diagram is very useful for making decisions and defining boundaries between artifacts.

Knowing the source of artifacts often influences the design of architecture diagrams, solution designs, and behavior designs.

Benefits:

• Identify external data sources.

• Easier and more convenient switching between applications.

• Seamlessly transition between Prolaborate and external data.

• Determine the origin of external data.

• Facilitate quicker and easier decision-making.

Features:

• The integration icon within Prolaborate recognizes each element imported by PCS integration.

• Overlays are visible on diagrams, Properties Window, and Overview Page.

• Supported icons include Jama, Jira, Polarion, Azure DevOps, ServiceNow, Bugzilla, and a generic symbol for other integrations.

• The feature works-based properties, Integration Source and Integration Link.

• Users can navigate to the source directly from Prolaborate.

Visualize information flow using Integration Map Chart

Take faster decisions with an integration map. Is there a better way to document the interrelation between artifacts that help us communicate with the consumer or provider? With its simple design, the chart tells us who the consumer or provider is. When a certain artifact is impacted, what are associated services that will be impacted, and more such details can be studied easily.

For architecture teams dealing with complex interrelationships between applications, application interfaces, or use cases, using a chart like this allows us to interpret information that would otherwise be overly complicated and unclear.

Benefits:

• Understand complex relationships more quickly.

• Make better and faster decisions.

• Reduce turnaround time with quicker decisions.

• Support business goals more effectively.

• Present information in a simpler format. 

Features:

• Visualize the interrelationships between the same artifact types, commonly used for interconnections of use cases, requirements, applications, application services, APIs, and more.

• Differentiate consumers and providers with unique colours.

• Easy to create and publish.

Organize Multiple Dashboards, Better!

Are you tired of sharing multiple dashboards with individuals and groups?

Our new feature allows you to gather various dashboards into a single dashboard view. Now, if you want to share a set of dashboards with specific groups or users, you can use this new feature.

Where will it be useful?

• Teams using large sets of dashboards.

• Teams that frequently access dashboards.

Benefits:

• A carefully designed user experience to enhance the overall dashboard design process.

• Easily design a dashboard with multiple dashboards.

• Simplify the process of sharing a set of dashboards with a group or individual user.

Features:

• Share multiple dashboards without the hassle of sending multiple links. Create a collection of dashboards on a single page and share the main dashboard with user groups or individuals.

• Choose an image as a thumbnail for a dashboard. Selecting a dashboard and image is easy with just a few clicks.

• No more hassle of creating multiple widgets to link to a dashboard on another dashboard.

Download review summary as PDF report 

Most teams that used the review feature were unable to take actions and discussions to the next step, such as auditing and reporting. By providing the review summary report as a PDF, teams utilizing reviews and those frequently conducting ISO audit controls will benefit. They can easily download it as a PDF report.

If I need to review the progress of the architecture review offline or share it with users who do not have access to Prolaborate, the review summary report becomes very handy. We can download and share the review report for ISO audits and more.

Benefits:

• Share it with external users.

• Reviews in Prolaborate are a commonly used feature among many users. Model governance plays a significant role in today’s enterprise and solution design, and this is facilitated through reviews.

• Review reports are essential for ISO audit controls and are often necessary for the approval cycle.

• Useful for audit checks.

Features:

• Download a summary report from each review.

• Users can choose a layout (portrait or landscape) and download the report in PDF format.

Advanced Search

We often need to find existing artifacts based on their properties in modeling. Advanced users searching for artifacts frequently struggle to locate them using properties such as tag names or values. To support these scenarios, we have introduced an advanced search feature.

This feature allows users to find artifacts based on tagged values, attributes, or operations. It will be very useful in many situations during model management, making the process of finding artifacts much easier. This will be an extremely handy feature for model management.

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