ARCSeeker: Reusable Asset Management Tool

What is ARCSeeker?

ARCSeeker is the utility tool which supports to manage and reuse Enterprise Architect's UML models.

With ARCSeeker, you can gather various software assets such as UML models, various kinds of documents and source files. Then you put them together and store them as a component. The stored components are managed in a domain which is called storage. By using various view and search features, you can find and use the stored components .

What ARCSeeker solves?

As you use Enterprise Architect to make UML models, the number of EAP files in your hard-drives or network-drives will be increased. Those EAP files might be a help when you design a new system which is similar to the past developments.

Sometimes you can not find the target EAP files or a part of models in EAP files which you want to view/use. Sometimes one of your colleagues already made a model which you want to use, but you did not know that he/she already made it. If you can know the model's existence, you can just ask him/her and use their model for the development.

By using ARCSeeker, you can make your work better. First you can store your UML models to ARCSeeker. When you store Enterprise Architect models to ARCSeeker, all diagrams in the model will be stored as images (PNG format) which allow you to check the component's contents easily.

After storing all your models to ARCSeeker, you can add tags and some information to the components to be able to know the contents of each component, how to use it, when is the best time to use it, etc. By adding the information, in the future, you or your colleagues can find suitable components easily.

When you want to find the existing components for the reference or copying, just run ARCSeeker. You can search components in various ways. If you can find interesting or useful components, you can import them easily to an Enterprise Architect project (EAP file or EA repository).

By using ARCSeeker, you can reuse existing information (model) effectively and efficiently.


If you want to know how to use ARCSeeker with Enterprise Architect in detail, see this page.

What are differences between ARCSeeker and Enterprise Architect's version control feature?

You can store and import UML models by using Enterprise Architect's version control (VC) feature. Both ARCSeeker and the VC feature can support to manage packages. But when you use the VC feature, you must distinguish packages only by the XML file names. You can not store related documents and information. With ARCSeeker, you can store and manage not only UML model but various files (Word, Excel, etc.), additional information to be easy to distinguish it, comments by users, relationships among other model, etc.

Comparing to the VC feature, using ARCSeeker has the following advantages:

  1. You can understand each model package by not only the XML file name, but also the model name, owner, description, etc (the tags). You can define your original tags. You can specify various relationships between components.
  2. When you store your package into ARCSeeker as a component, ARCSeeker automatically checks dependencies between EA model packages, and recommend you to store the related packages at the same time.
  3. When you wish to use the stored components in ARCSeeker, ARCSeeker automatically checks the target EAP file (or EA repository). If the EAP file does not have the dependent components, ARCSeeker will recommend you to import the components at the same time.
  4. You can see the relationships between components in a storage as "image." See the image below.

The VC feature is used during the design and development phases, and after the phases, it is time to use ARCSeeker.

You can trace components and products which use the components by using ARCSeeker. To know detail more about this feature, click here.

Editions of ARCSeeker

There are two ARCSeeker editions. One is the current Professional edition, and the other is the Enterprise edition.

The Professional edition is for private-use or small-medium company/division to store and share EA models. The Enterprise edition allows users to assign access rights to each Component. You can install unlimited number of ARCSeeker Enterprise edition clients.

Extend ARCSeeker as you like

When you use ARCSeeker, you may want to let ARCSeeker do your process-dependent actions. For example, if you want to check automatically whether components' properties are entered or set correctly, you can do it by extending ARCSeeker. In another case, you need to get a component's information or modify it from an external application. You can do it by using ARCSeeker API.

ARCSeeker has powerful ActiveX-COM Automation Interface. You can use components in ARCSeeker as you like, or you can make your original Add-ins and call them from the ARCSeeker menu (main menu and all context menus).

Price

See this page about Price of ARCSeeker.

The Other Information

The other information is available from the following pages.