Repository Tool for IT Landscape Artifacts Software Services - repository

We are looking to store our Software company's all documents which can be easily modified, searched, shared withing Teams.
It is like Sharepoint but need more sophisticated tool which undertand various document formats
Like Swagger , Code Files, Excel, and very well sturcutre to orgainize and link documents.
We can to create our Architecture and Solution Repository

ok, then you need:
1- a store
2- version control utility
3- a tool too develop togaf specific stuff (views, viewpoints, stackholder definitions, ABBs, SBBs, architecture diagrams, container documents that refers to these diagrams such as architecture definition and architecture contract docs )
4- a tool to understand various document formats to track the changes internally (including word documents and excel sheets)
let me start from bottom up,
4-I don't know any tool that is able to understand complex format like docx, even microsoft tfs deals with word files as a binary file, thus it can't track the changes done inside a document, I think you will need to compromise this point and rely more on a well structured process of providing sufficient and precise comments by whoever commits to the repository + well utilizing components in point 3
3- Archi (free) - Sparx / visual paradigm (commercial) (I have a very small experience with it but it seems to be sufficient)
2- any source control tool (git / svn / tfs / mercural) .. and if you use Archi, it's eclipse based and eclipse has plugins to most of source control tools
1- according to point 2, the repository will be defined, in case of git for example it will be a Git repository
but any ways, you will need to define a process and guidelines inside your organization for managing the architectures then the tools will just support.
Though not perfect, hope it helps !

Though a bit late, let me try to answer from my experience. Enterprise Architecture Platforms / Tool should fit your expectations with many more features that you need for architecting solutions other than the primary document management, collaborations and content management.
I suggest you to look at Orbus IServer as it is purely document based. It accepts all Microsoft format files like visio, excel, docx, powerpoint, sharepoint, power bi. It also accepts ERWIN files
Here is the link which speaks about its integration.

Related

What are the main points that must be documented for a data integration project?

I am working on a data integration project using Talend.
I have many input sources heterogeneous, I make transformations and I save output data to many output sources. Actually, I am doing Extraction, Transformation and Load (ETL).
My Talend Job is executing everyday on a linux server (the production). I have a development and test environment on a windows VM, ... In fact, I have many things I want to document and I don't really know how. I used to document web development projects (just the frontend), but not data integration projects.
Can you guys help me with some keywords, examples, templates, so that I can make a clear documentation for my client ?
Thanks in advance :)
While I can't speak to your organizational needs, Talend is designed to be largely self documenting. If you were diligent in filling out the documentation and descriptions in your job, you can right click the job and select 'Generate Doc as HTML'.

Software Engineering Component Repository Tool

I'm working as a software engineer for a company. We are going to apply some software engineering standards in our development process. We need a tool which provides a repository for our peripheral products (functions, classes, libraries, ...) which is created during software development process for later use. The tool should provide some functionalities (e.g Name of the component, it's functionality, withing which projects it is used?, author, publication date, list of known bugs, user rating, comment, ...) and it's better to have a web-based interface. Does anybody know such a software?
You should check out FogBugz. Its a great project management tool which has recently released Kiln which is source control you can integrate with your projects.
A cheaper alternative is to look at something like XP-Dev.
In my experience, such a tool doesn't exist because the problem is solved differently. Companies typically use component frameworks, whether their own or 3rd party, and develop new components that conform to the component standard from their framework.
Each project then depends on the framework rather than on specific versions of specific components. This also resolves interdependencies and all related version compatibility issues.
Component framework is typically documented somewhere by its vendor and newly created components can be added to your company's wiki, such as mediaWiki.
Alternatively, the company may need some knowledge management. See the introductory videos from kbPublisher. kbPublisher is an OpenSource Knowledge Base which may be even more suitable than a groupware like mediaWiki. The free version of kbPublisher can be downloaded here.
Note each project should have a feature which displays the framework version number and configuration, as needed by staff. This way, when you are targeting a particular client, the system can be identified remotely.
Open source tools like GIT or SVN may provide source code management however they may lack in the functions you are asking particularly bugs or ratings. There are also many paid tools available in the market which not only provides source code management but also management and integrations over projects. You may explore:
TFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Foundation_Server
Rational Clear Case http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/clearcase

Software/Platform to Share Specs

What are the software/ Wiki you use to write and share your specs about the developers, testers and management?
Do you use Wiki system, and if so, what Wiki software you use?
Or do you use Sharepoint to manage and version the specs? One problem with SharePoint 2003 as specs platform is that it's very hard to collaborate among different people.
For backward compatibility sake, I would also like to have the platform able to import Microsoft Word seamlessly. And it would certainly help if the interface is similar to Microsoft Word.
Any idea?
I've used Confluence at a number of places, it's a pretty powerful wiki and very good for creating specifications that can be shared amongst various parties. See:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/
There's some more information here on the advantages of using Confluence:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/170352/confluence-experiences
EDIT: I've updated this to deal with the Microsoft Word import feature you mentioned. Confluence supports this through the Office Connector here:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/plugins/office-connector.jsp
There's also a Sharepoint connector:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/plugins/sharepoint-connector.jsp
plus a whole bunch of plugins:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/plugins/sharepoint-connector.jsp
Some of these are user contributed also. I can't recommend Confluence enough as a commercial wiki.
I've also used JSPWiki, which is open source. it's ok but not as good as confluence, see:
http://www.jspwiki.org/
You could try Google docs - I have successfully used this in the past. It supports import / export to MS Word, and it has great support for multiple user - see http://www.brighthub.com/internet/google/articles/8236.aspx.
It supports versioning, allows you to chat with other people who are currently working on the document, and shows you a list of all the changes others have made to the document (without needing to close / reopen the document).
If you want corporate support, Google also provides that - see Google Apps for business.
We use SharePoint -- it's not ideal, but it does a decent job. If I were you, I would seriously look at getting off SharePoint 2003 and on to MOSS (SharePoint 2007). It's not perfect, but it's substantially better. Here's a little bit on using MOSS as a wiki. I think in general wiki's are a good tool for getting people up to speed on your system. We used to pass around "getting started documents" and now we have all that type of stuff in our developer portal.
Per John's comment, I looked up this feature comparison. I have to go back and look at what features I'm using that are not in WSS -- I might be paying for licenses I don't need! :)
We use email. I know it isn't elaborate, but it is easy to use. Everyone has it installed and there are no licensing issues. All spec changes are sent to an super set email distro indicating the updates and the location on the network share where the spec can be found.
We use Alfresco, in its Community version, from both its Share and Explorer web interfaces.
Quite useful, with a document library, wiki, forum and calendar.
We curently host about 1.8 Go consisting mainly in docs, versionned and sometimes automatically converted to PDF (by creating an automatic content rule).
FTP, WebDav and network share are also used to access to the same repository.
You could take a look at Microsoft Groove - the collaboration software that Microsoft bought a few years back.
It's bundled free with premium versions of Microsoft Office.
You can customize the workspace with discussion boards and can fairly seamlessly store collaboratively-edited Office documents.
We use MediaWiki for dos & specs. Wiki definitely wins anything like Microsoft Word or SharePoint - it allows you to develop a documentation in "first refer, then describe" = "divide and rule" way. Perfect for developers - they used to think the same way. The process of developing a documentation is almost ideal: you start from TOC and drill down until you write the document for every link you put earlier.
MediaWiki is quite customizable - there are lots of extensions there. The most necessary ones are:
Source code highlighter - CSO_Source
Our own templates integrating wiki with class reference.
Others are InterWiki, FileProtocolLinks, YouTube (we use customized version of it to display HD video), ReCaptcha, SpecialDeleteOldRevisions, Maintenance.
Some integration examples are here.
And we use Google issue tracker to track the issues. Its main advantages:
Imput usability: the process of adding\changing the issue is really convenient there. Earlier we tried Track Studio - the same actions require 2-3 times more time there, so it died fast simply because most of us hated to use it.
Customizable grids. See the examples. Really helpful.
Atom\RSS support. So everyone knows what's going on.
There is a Gurtle tool integrating it with TortoiseSVN. Really helpful.
Its main disadvantage is that it can't be closed from the public access. This makes it simply unusable in many cases.
If you want a UI similar to Word, why not use Word with SharePoint 2007? You're on 2003 so the experience is there. Upgrade to SharePoint 2007 and you can have the collaboration, Word features, document sharing, and so on.
This is the kind of thing Microsoft wants people to use Office for, so there's a ton of doco out there about how to configure your SharePoint and Office environment to support collaboration.
There is something that Google do in this direction and it looks really cool: wave.google.com. It would be a great step in collaboration and worth to wait it.
Here we use Google Docs it makes the documents available to everyone write or read only, public or private among people that have or not Google accounts, it also can import Word docs, not to mention that it runs directly into the browser so it has high availability with zero cost and zero setup, also its computer/OS agnostic, we have a nice experience with it.
Also perhaps you should take a look at Basecamp or Backpack at 37Signals, any of then might also fit your bill.
We use DocBook for all of our specifications (and other customer-facing documentation). DocBook is an XML format that lets you easily generate documents in just about any format, including PDF, which is how we distribute things to clients to get them signed off. We can divide a document into files (by section) and commit everything to our source control system (Subversion). Because it is all XML (i.e. text-based), Subversion's automatic merging and conflict resolution works great if two people work on the same file. We have a set of stylesheets that all of our documents use, so all documents share the exact same style/format, with no extra work on our part.
And if you don't like editing XML files directly, there are GUI front-ends that provide a reasonably WYSIWYG-like experience. I believe that most people in my office use XMLMind. Still, we happen to all be technical people so if we had to write XML directly it wouldn't be an issue.
As a sidenote, we also put out release notes. We have some XSLT that lets us write documents like this:
<bugs>
<bug id="1234" component="web">JavaScript error when clicking the Kick Me button</bug>
</bugs>
We then have a script that runs through our Subversion repository doing an svn log from the previous release tag to the current release tag, and some Bugzilla integration to automatically generate release notes on-the-fly.
(also, for most internal-only documentation, we use MediaWiki, which is also a great way to collaborate.)
We use OnTime. It was originally only used for defect tracking, but we've started using it to track features as well. These can be used to document the feature as it evolves during development. Features can be grouped together into sprints or releases, and time can be tracked against each feature. If you are using SCRUM, you can also plot burn-down charts for each sprint. It also has wiki functionality.

What is a good collaboration website for developers?

We have a number of developers located around the world which we need to collaborate with.
Our functionality required is:
Some sort of white board, which multiple users can view, and update.
A private wiki.
A ticket system for managing workload.
A source control system would be nice, but not required.
Ideally this would already be hosted somewhere (and free), alternatively if any software
can do this, which is also not expensive, that would be fine.
Ideally all this functionality would run over standard http.
I like Assembla, among others it offers:
- SVN
- Trac
- MessageBoard
- Wiki
and some more features. Also you get 200MB free space for every project...
Base Camp may provide some of what you need: http://www.basecamphq.com/
Slicehost + Trac + Subversion/Mercurial/Git/Bazaar.
Unfortunately, I don't know of any open source whiteboards :(
The advantage of configuring your own machine is that you can configure whatever you want. It would be a real shame if your development team decided that bzr was the way they wanted to go, but you're hosted project management app didn't support it very well.
GitHub
The free plan is for open source but it can be used for private projects too. Includes:
Wiki
Issue tracker
Source control

Managing ABAP Source Code in Source Control

Our product currently spans a large number of technologies, including Java, PL/SQL, VB.Net and ABAP. We have a fairly mature source control and build system set up for all of the languages except ABAP, which is still in the stone ages. Since SAP has a build system set up within it, our engineers do all of their development in an SAP environment export transports, and check those into source control. Since we support a number of SAP versions, it becomes very difficult to track versions and migrate code across 4.6, 4.7, 5.0, etc.
My ideal process would be to check the ABAP code into source control in text files, and then load it into SAP and generate the transports as part of the build process. The SAP engineers don't think there are tools to support this model.
If you are managing ABAP code in a source control system, what does your process look like? Are there tools available (preferably command-line) for loading ABAP code into SAP? How do your engineers manage the code/test/debug cycle? Do they code in SAP and then export the code when finished, or edit in an external editor?
I used SAPLINK (mentioned in previous answer) for that purpose. There is also a related project called "zake", that supposedly can automate some of the tasks but I never used it. I simply exported my code manually to so-called slinkees (they contain single objects like function groups; nuggets on the other hand contain several objects).
Reasons to use some external source control system:
correlation to non-abap source code (as our software consisted of .net and abap code)
hosting / maintaining SAP was not something we were exactly good at, so it was good to know you had your code in a safe place
one thing though: you need at least WAS 620 in order to use saplink
I'm interested as to what the benefit is of version control outside the ABAP stack of the SAP system.
I've never seen anyone use external source code control for ABAP, as it's built right in. I've never seen anyone code ABAP outside the SAP system either. It really doesn't fit the model.
SAP's ABAP stack is a single-development system environment. All the developers log on to the one system and develop there. The system records versions automatically, and groups changed objects into transports. A transport is just a list of changed objects. Once you export the transport, the version numbers are incremented for each object and you get the package for the other systems.
The ABAP stack also doesn't really have a "build" concept as such. Everything you do is a patch.
Also check out SAP CTS+ which is used for managing transports and version control of ABAP and JAVA based components.
https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/e0249083-c0ab-2a10-78b8-b7a7854b1070
At the very least, modifications should be done and tested in an SAP development system. Nobody uses an external editor with ABAP. (SAP Java on the other hand...) There is no reason why you can't keep backups of the SAP code, either directly, as text files, or, (preferably) with SAPLink or transport dump files. (Ask your BASIS people about the transport files). Realize that if you go the text file route, you might miss out on things like field text, etc., which are stored elsewhere in the database.
Hy,
As Dom told you, SAP has it's own version managment. However in order to makes regular save between transport releasing, you might use tools like :
SAPLink (as saied Wili aus Rohr)
ZAPLink
this tools could be use to extract ABAP components into XML. I really do not advise to make automatic import into SAP, for many reasons :
# thoses tools have no guaranties
# not all ABAP Compoponent can be handled like this
# you will lose SAP guaranty if you do this on a productive SAP system
But it might be interesting to use tools like (Google code) to display in detail software change, which could be more complicated on ABAP Object.
I developed this on ZAP Link framework with ZAPLINK_EXTRACTOR program that export SAP Components into XML when they have changed. This prevent XML file to change (new file but same content) and to be detected by tools such as mercurial as a change.
Hope it helps.
Keep in mind that you should use SAP tools to change SAP Component. SAP consultant might explain it to you in details.
Taryck.
[http://www.steria.com Steria (France)]
The 2020 answer to the question is simply: Use AbapGit.
It gives you all the advantages of modern version control, is fully documented, open source and works like a charm.