In something of a quiet and unheralded moment to all other than folks interested in true Enterprise Architecture, Mike Walker, made a pretty big announcement the other month at the Japan Strategic Architecture Forum: He announced the “Enterprise Architecture Toolkit Alpha”.
The Toolkit is essentially a Solution Accelerator, or a package of tools, documentation, and framework elements to jumpstart people in establishing Enterprise Architecture and it’s traditional components. Capabilities include: (as per Mike’s blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/mikewalker/archive/2008/04/14/japan-strategic-architecture-forum-day-2.aspx)
Repository – Meta-data repository for uniting enterprise processes, storing existing architecture assets and a catalog for patterns (Software Factories in Microsoft terms or Architecture Building Blocks (ABB) in TOGAF ADM terms)
- Architecture Management – Portal and Workflow assets that aid in the processes and govern architecture creation through the SDLC or through post production service management processes.
- Strategy Management – Portal and Workflow that aid in the creation of as-is or current state architecture, to-be or future state architectures and the management of technology life cycles of architectures.
- Community – Portal technologies that aid in the communication and collaboration, vetting of ideals through-out the enterprise, communication of Principles, Policies, Standards and Design Patterns, Add-Ins and Templates for architecture development.
- Modeling – Usage scenarios for how to leverage Microsoft Visio to correlate architecture information from the Architecture Meta-Data Repository to Visio diagrams and shapes.
Since this is a solution accelerator the EATK capabilities are implemented as a series of scenarios.
Interestingly, since it was announced in Japan, most of the information is in Japanese. A lot more on the topic can be found at this link:
http://blogs.msdn.com/mikewalker/archive/2008/07/07/the-enterprise-architecture-toolkit.aspx
For more information about Enterprise Architecture and how to leverage Microsoft technologies in your organization to implement one correctly leveraging establish best practices to cross-platform boundaries, go to:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/EA
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