Enterprise Architect is a powerful tool for specifying, documenting and building your software projects. Using Enterprise Architect's support for UML and its related standards, you can model new complex software and business systems, or visualize and maintain existing systems.

Manage Complexity

Enterprise Architect helps you manage complexity with tools to track dependencies, support for very large models, version control with CVS or SCC providers,  Baselines for point-in-time snapshots, the Compare (Diff) utility to track changes to the model, and an intuitive and high performance user interface with an 'Explorer-like' project view.

Share Models

Enterprise Architect enables you to share complete models or specific aspects of a model between members of a team, including (through the 'Lite', read-only edition) stakeholders who can study a model but not change or manage it. You can make the project .EAP file available on a shared network drive, or replicate the .EAP file for complex distributed development.  Alternatively, you can develop the project in one of several shared DBMS repositories, such as SQL Server; My SQL; PostgreSQL; Oracle 9i, 10g or 11g; and Sybase ASA. You can import and export data as XMI files to distribute and update frameworks and other package-based model structures. You control changes through the version control repository. Enterprise Architect provides a data transfer wizard that enables you to upsize or downsize the complete model for maximum flexibility, and it enables you to export and import reference data so that you do not have to recreate it for related projects.

Develop Personal Views and Extracts of the Model

Enterprise Architect enables you to develop any number of different views of your model, or parts of it, either for your personal use or for the use of your team. These Model Views are generated by reports, so they can be set up to always show the current status of the selected view. The facility also enables you to create Favorites folders of links to frequently-used data structures. 

Audit Project Development

Enterprise Architect provides an auditing facility that enables you to monitor details of model changes, such as who made the change and when, what the change is and what the previous value was, and what changes have been made by a specific person. The facility can be turned off and on as required, and can be tailored to present particular sets of information. You can save the information in archive files and recover it as necessary.

Generate Documentation

Enterprise Architect provides powerful document generation and reporting tools with a full WYSIWYG template editor for RTF or HTML output. You can generate complex and detailed reports from Enterprise Architect with the information you require in the format your company or client demands.

Generate and Reverse Engineer Source Code

Enterprise Architect supports generation and reverse engineering of source code for many popular languages, including C++, C#, Java, Delphi, VB.Net, Visual Basic, ActionScript, Python and PHP. With a built in 'syntax highlighting' source code editor, Enterprise Architect enables you to quickly navigate and explore your model source code in the same environment. Code generation templates enable you to customize the generated source code to your company specifications.

Visualize Your Applications

Enterprise Architect helps you visualize your applications by supporting reverse engineering of a wide range of software development languages and database repository schema. Bring in complete frameworks from source code or Java .jar files - or even .Net binary assemblies! By importing frameworks and library code, you can maximize re-use and understanding of your existing investment.

Perform MDA Transformations

Enterprise Architect supports advanced Model Driven Architecture (MDA) transformations using easy to edit and develop transformation templates. With built-in transformations for DDL, C#, Java, EJB and XSD, you can quickly develop complex solutions from simple platform independent models (PIMs) that are targeted at platform specific models (PSMs). One PIM can be used to generate and synchronize multiple PSMs, providing a significant productivity boost.

Model Databases

Enterprise Architect enables you to reverse engineer from many popular DBMS systems, including Oracle 9i, 10g or 11g; SQL Server; My SQL; Access and PostgreSQL.  You can model database tables, columns, keys, foreign keys and complex relationships using UML and an inbuilt data modeling profile, and forward generate DDL scripts to create target database structures.

Customize Enterprise Architect

Enterprise Architect also includes a Software Developers' Kit that enables experienced tool developers to customize and extend Enterprise Architect to suit the specific requirements of their organization with, for example, in-house UML Profiles, Add-Ins and Code Templates. The very detailed Automation Interface gives you access to most element features, major functions such as XMI import/export, and attached information. Most properties are fully writable from the automation client. The Automation Interface provides great support for plug-ins, with the ability to embed automation client windows in the main diagram view. The Interface is accessible from any automation-aware client language, such as VB, C#, C++ and Delphi.

Link Enterprise Architect to IDEs

Using Sparx Systems Model Driven Generation (MDG) Link plug-ins, you can develop source code in your preferred Integrated Development Environment such as Visual Studio .NET or Eclipse, and use Enterprise Architect to locate the source code for Classes, attributes and operations, and to model, navigate, track, reverse engineer, build and run your project.

The MDG Integration products for Eclipse and Visual Studio 2005 provide an even closer, seamless integration of Enterprise Architect and UML 2.1 with your IDE, bringing the functionality required of a fully fledged modeling platform right inside the IDE.

Extend Enterprise Architect to Integrate With Niche Tools

Enterprise Architect is the core for a range of MDG Technology Add-Ins that enable you to extend its modeling capabilities to use more specialized, niche frameworks, profiles such as DDS, Zachman Framework and SysML. Some of these, such as ICONIX, BPMN, Data Flow Diagrams and Mind Mapping, are already provided with the Enterprise Architect installer. Enterprise Architect also provides support for downloading MDG Technologies from external system files or websites, or for creating your own easily with the Enterprise Architect MDG Technology Wizard.