*Now available in the shop!*

TM Forum Frameworx is an enterprise architecture framework (EAF) for the telecom and digital service provider industries. It embraces the sub-frameworks of eTOM, TAM, and SID. TM Forum is the organization that owns the intellectual property on Frameworx and continuously maintains its contents. TransWare AG, as a member and partner of TM Forum as well as a technical partner of Sparx Systems Pty Ltd, has made Frameworx accessible to the leading EA/BPM modeling tool Sparx Systems™ Enterprise Architect (SparxEA). The product TM Forum Frameworx for Enterprise Architect comprises the sub-frameworks of eTOM and TAM (SID will follow in a later version).

Sparx Sparx Enterprise Architect (EA) is a modeling tool used by Enterprise Architects in many organizations. Over the time this tool has evolved from an UML/SysML tool to a full featured Enterprise Architecture tool supporting different frameworks (NIEM, CCTS, Zachmann, TOGAF or UPDM) or modeling languages like BPMN. On the other side Microsoft Visio is "the" diagramming tool for business users or analysts. In the following blog posts we research the interchange of model data and diagrams between both tools.

*TM Forum Frameworx EA 17.5 now available at the shop!*

TM Forum Frameworx is an enterprise architecture framework for telecom and digital service provider industries, it embraces eTOM, TAM, and SID. TM Forum is the organization that owns the intellectual property on Frameworx and continuously maintains its contents. TransWare AG, as a member and partner of TM Forum, has made Frameworx accessible to the leading modeling tool Sparx Systems™ Enterprise Architect (EA). Our product TM Forum Frameworx for Enterprise Architect is two things: A one-to-one translation of the Frameworx source to EA and a Frameworx add-in for EA. The Frameworx EA model currently includes the meta-data-rich diagram and element contents of eTOM, TAM, and partly SID. TM Forum members can order TM Forum Frameworx for Enterprise Architect here. All you need is EA as of version 12 or higher.

TFS is the central hub for development using Microsoft Visual Studio managing teams, resources and agile development processes. BPM-X® is the middleware for model-based testing and links modeling tools like Microsoft Visio®, Software AG ARIS, Sparx Enterprise Architect or many others with the testing and requirements capabilities of TFS. 

ProVision is a EA and BPA modeling tool from the US with a long history: developed by Proforma Inc. it was 2007 acquired by Metastorm Inc. and 2010 acquired by OpenText®. As there are many new standards and tools in the market like BPMN, Microsoft Visio® or Software AG ARIS®. In this post we show the comparison between Opentext ProVision notebooks and Microsoft Visio as deliverables of the conversion.

With the introduction of Visio 2013 Microsoft has dropped the binary data format .VSS and the XML format .VDX for diagram file storage. VSDX was introduced as the new XML data format for storage of diagrams and consists of a ZIP archive with a bundle of XML files. The TransWare developer team added support (see Blog post about Visio 2013) to write and read native .VSDX files for the new data format. In 2015 Microsoft introduced the new Visio 2016.