New version released

• Added automatic depth of field.
  • In story mode, the depth of field widget can now be set to ‘on’, ‘off’, or ‘auto’. If ‘on’, you can set the focal distance, focal length, and aperture to control the depth of field effect. If ‘auto’, the focal distance is set to whatever model element you’re looking directly at / centre of the screen.
  • In the top right menu icons, there’s a new auto depth of field icon – see Top right controls
• Updated the Tech Demo download to provide support for quite a lot more REST API calls, from Ruby to AIM – See AIM API
• Released new ArchiMate Validator for validating ArchiMate models. You can configure any number of different filters and rules to help develop your Program or Solution Architecture faster and more robustly.

New version released

• Added new depth of field story widget, which can change the focal length and focal distance of the camera to blur foreground or background items. See Telling Stories.
• Updated the Tech Demo download so that it contains a demo story using all of the available story widgets. Open this up to see how a story can be put together with the different story widgets.

New version released

• Using the mouse scroll wheel while hovering over the UI no longer zooms the camera in/out. IF you’re hovering over the UI, then the mouse scroll wheel will scroll any UI scrollable areas.
• Improvements to story mode, so that you can now click the Play icon individually against each story widget. This is useful when you’re creating and editing stories, so you can manually step through the story 1 element at a time.
• The Explore window now lists all available model properties for selection to visually filter the model. Previously, it only showed Information type properties.
• New AIM REST API doco provided – AIM CLI

New version released

The tech demo work-in-progress content has now been made available. This simulate 2 business scenarios so far, with more to follow shortly – see Tech Demo.

New version released

Changes

• Various stability and performance improvements.
• Increased mouse wheel scroll speed when zooming in/out.

Bug fixes

• If you had an Access connector between a Function and and Information Store (to denote that the Function either input or output to the Info Store), then when you deleted the Function it did not properly remove the Access connector.

New version released

General

• Various stability and performance improvements
• Uses new Unity 2020.2, and adds ambient occlusion (shadowing) to how objects are rendered

Functionality

• If you add a data store to a component (either as ‘Master’ or ‘Copy’) then master information is shown in red, and copy in purple.
• Architecture compiler rules have changed slightly. Previously, a function outputting to a flow would implicitly draw from any ‘master’ or ‘copy’ information source, whereas now this must be specified explicitly as a function output (to the flow).

Tech Demo

• Various changes made to allow for server-side scripting to be implemented in any language. Previously, server-side scripting was supported in JScript. The AIM tech demo to be incrementally released will be in Ruby, and have persistency in MongoDB.

License key recovery

Also fixed an issue with some of the cloud hosted infrastructure that was causing license key distribution emails to fail in some cases. If you have any further issues recovering license keys please contact support.

New version released.

Main changes

• General stability improvements
• Ability to create your own server-side AIM server for data processing of AIM business scenarios. Previously, you needed to use the supplied AIM Server and could built JScript server-side scripts to handle data processing for scenarios. This has now been expanded. We’ve been creating server-side scripts using Ruby, and persisting scenario data into MongoDB, but you should be able to use pretty much any language. This is going to be a fairly powerful improvement in terms of ability to write more sophisticated server side scripting, and have persistent data used by your scenarios.
• Modified default behaviour of running Scenarios, so that they only run once by default, instead of on a loop. This is because with the new ability for model data persistence (above) it only makes sense for the scenario to run once.
• Modified Scenario visualisation so that each model element in the scenario goes from blue -> green if it successfully executes, or red if there’s a failure. Also now displays the server-side error message in the model if it fails to make debugging easier.
• New ‘Shader’ story element, that can be incorporated into an animated story.
• Modification to shaders, so that there is a separate shader name and separate field to enter the model property to use for the shader. e.g. previously, a shader called ‘Domain’ would require that model elements needed to have a property exactly called ‘Domain’, which might have values of ‘Marketing’, ‘Sales’, ‘Delivery’, etc, but now the shader can have a different name, e.g. “Business Domains”, which is separate to the name of the property the shader uses, e.g. “Domain”.
• Performance improvement to shading/resetting shading in the model. Now instant.
• Increase anti-aliasing to sharpen how things look
• Add ability for AIM to receive REST requests, so that it can be controlled by other applications or command lines that can generate REST requests.

We’ve just released a new version of AIM, with 2 important new features

• Business scenario simulation
• Export to Concept of Operations guide

Business scenario simulation

Business scenario simulation lets you process real data through your AIM model.

Once you’ve created your AIM model, you can attach scripts to receive, process, and output information.  JScript is the scripting language used to process data in JSON format through your model.

This is similar but different to BPM. Whereas BPM allows you to simulate the flow of control, AIM allows you to simulate the flow of information. The intent with AIM is to also simulate flows at a much higher level of abstraction than you might with BPM. Based on achieving agreement across the Enterprise on an information processing approach, you might then choose BPM to model further as you deep dive into 1 specific area of your AIM model.

This next level of detail, performing business scenario simulation on top of your existing macro design, gives you extra certainty in your design, in the form of defining the next level of detail on information processed.

For example, if everyone agrees that in your AIM model there’s a “Sales Dashboard” function that receives “Customer Summary” information, do we all agree what’s contained in that — is it just the Customer and receive Sales History, or does it also include the Financial History? Many projects have failed due to this basic information not being defined or understood up front.

With Macro data simulation you can model these high level structural information elements as they flow through your model, improving your information design, and de-risking your projects.

Concept of Operations Guide

There’s a new option under File > Export, to create a Concept of Operations guide in MS Word.

This is an export of all of your AIM model elements, with cross-references.

The idea is that while you’ll generate some insights about your business from directly using AIM, you’ll also want to export into document format sometimes.

This new export format is in additional to being able to export to Open Exchange (for use in most modern Architecture modelling tools), and Excel (so that you can map your IT portfolio against your AIM model).

Both of these are features are quite stable, but in beta, with more planned enhancements due to release in the next few weeks.

There’s a new demo version of AIM available. Give it a try and let us know what you think – downloads

Follow the step by step videos in the How To section to get started.