Hi Folks,

Thanks so much to the many ARIS community members, experts and contributors for all their feedback and encouragement from the first two sets of videos. The most common request coming out of the messages was a quick guide on how to do some of the basic administrative tasks required to manage ARIS, and that’s resulted in this third series being created! In case you missed the first two sets, here are the links:

• Check out my tutorial series and grow as an ARIS expert
• The Art of the Possible: Best Practices, Tips and Tricks to get the most out of ARIS

Now, let’s talk ARIS Administration. When I first started with ARIS, all I needed to know was how to navigate and model – the two key components of a designer, and perfect for a young BPA professional. However, I soon realized that there was someone behind the scenes controlling and shaping my work, building and maintaining the environment, and satisfying all our deliverable needs without a word – the ARIS Admin. I studied under him for weeks, learning the tools of the trade, some of which were contained in the official training material offered by Software AG, and some of which were sage lessons taken from years of consulting experience at clients. Once I was ready, he passed the keys to the kingdom on to me, bestowing me with System User privileges and responsibility to manage an environment supporting a year-long project with over 50 active designer users. I was lucky enough to have had the hands-on mentoring to be able to handle this new challenge, but I know that many first-time ARIS Admins don’t have the luxury of a talented and experienced teacher to walk them through the important tasks and functionality.

This series is designed to bridge that gap. In terms of knowledge, this series will present a combination of both technical administration skills – where to click and what functionality is available and necessary, as well as tips and tricks to use that functionality best and keeping it easiest for first-time admins. This is not meant as a replacement for the official training courses for ARIS administration – the short videos only brush over some of the more deep technical functionality that you’ll definitely need to learn as your expand your ARIS instance in a larger context such as governance, advanced report scripting, factsheet configuration, and integration.

I would recommend watching the videos in order, as the knowledge used does build on previous video content. I would also recommend you watch and implement the knowledge of these videos prior to standing up your environment and making it available to users – there are a few important things contained within the series that you’ll definitely want to have in place first!

• How to support your first ARIS project or instance
• Creating and maintaining Group Structures
• Basic user and user group management
• Basic method filter configuration
• Basic Method Configuration
• Useful simple wysiwyg report creation
• Creating object libraries
• Mass import of objects and their attributes
• Import visio models
• Building entry models for your environment
• Basic ARIS content portal configuration
• Creating your own custom symbols
• Setting a common look and feel for ARIS
• Simple walkthrough of table based BPMN

By the end of the series, I’m hoping you have a basic understanding of the admin tasks required, both one-time (on startup) and periodic, and know where to click to make them come to life. I would recommend practicing these tasks before your users come online or in a non-production environment. Know that the majority of the settings can be “reset to defaults”, so it’s better to try things out and gain the experience before you need to use those skills at scale.

As always, I love getting feedback and messages about the videos, so feel free to reach out with comments and questions, and I’ll get back to you either directly or through another video series!

Cheers,

J-M