ARCSeeker is the tool which supports the reuse of Software Assets.
In ARCSeeker, you can gather various Software Assets such as specifications and source files, put them together, and register them as a 'Component'. The registered Components are managed in a domain called 'Storage'. Thus you can find and use registered Components by using various View and Search functions.
What ARCSeeker solves?
As you use Enterprise Architect to make Models, there are many EAP files in your Hard-drive or Network-drive. In your future work, some EAP files stored in Hard-drive or Network-drive may help you when you design new similar systems to past developments.
In these cases, sometimes you can not find EAP files or a part of model in an EAP file which you want to view/use. And sometimes your colleague was already made a model which you want to use, but you did not know that he/she already made it. In this case, if you are able to know about the model's existence, you can just ask him/her and use their model to copy or modify.
With ARCSeeker, you can make your work better. Firstly, you can store your UML models to ARCSeeker. Here, it is better to consider that each Component has objective(s) or solves some issue. When you store Enterprise Architect models, all diagrams in the model will be stored as images which allows you to check or find assets easily.
After storing all your models as Components, you can add Tags and some information to the Components to be able to know what the Component is, how to use the Component, when the best time to use the Component is, etc. By adding this information, in the future you or your colleagues can find the suitable Components easily.
When you are starting to make a new model or you want to find an existing Component to view or copy, run ARCSeeker which allows you to search in various ways. If you can find an interesting or useful Component, you can import it easily to an Enterprise Architect project file.
By using ARCSeeker properly, you can use existing information effectively and efficiently.
We have a plan to offer two ARCSeeker editions. One is the current 'Professional' edition, and another is the future 'Corporate' edition release.
The current 'Professional' edition is for private-use or small-medium company/division to store and share EA models. We have a plan to offer a 'Corporate' edition, which allows users to manage users/groups of ActiveDirectory, assign access rights to them, and store Assets in SQLServer/Oracle.
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 automatically check that Component's properties are entered or set correctly, you must extend ARCSeeker. In some other cases, you need to get the Component's information or modify it from an external application.
For these cases, ARCSeeker has a powerful ActiveX-COM Automation Interface. You can extend ARCSeeker as you like, or you can make your original Add-ins and call them from the ARCSeeker menu (Main menu and every context menu).
