In times of great business disruption, our decision-making faculties are tested to the extreme. Enterprise architecture and IT portfolio management find their purpose in providing the insights that inform change decisions and instill confidence in choosing a new way forward. Alfabet release 10.7 focuses on capabilities that improve the quality of information available for decisions and those that facilitate implementation of those decisions.
Major new features include integration with the Microsoft Teams and Atlassian Confluence collaboration platforms, further steps in integration with Microsoft Azure DevOps, and AI-enabled Data Quality Monitoring. Release 10.7 also includes new and enhanced visualizations as well as user experience (UX) enhancements in the AlfaBot conversational user interface (CUI), data-driven questionnaires and other functional areas. Here are the highlights:
- Embedded Microsoft Teams Collaboration: Open collaboration on business and IT portfolio management topics to a much larger expanse of subject matter experts using Microsoft Teams to facilitate exchanges on objects and use cases.
- Alfabet Integration with Atlassian Confluence: Use this popular wiki to inform and include all the relevant stakeholders on IT transformation initiatives, programs and changes by easily including real-time images of Alfabet content that links to the respective view in Alfabet.
- Integration with MS Azure DevOps (ADO) (continued): Keep CICD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery) activities aligned with business and IT strategy by synchronizing projects, releases, builds and work items between Alfabet’s IT portfolio management structures and ADO using the ADO Rest API.
- AI-enabled Data Quality Analysis: Ensure transformation decisions are based on high-quality information using AI techniques that can easily handle immense data stores and comfortably deal with the complexities of your data.
- Enhancements to the AlfaBot: Offer occasional Alfabet users more functionality and easier handling of the AlfaBot conversational user interface (CUI).
- Card View Report: Display tabular data as visually clear and easy-to-read cards that can include images and icons for better recognizability.
- Enhancements to Reports: Communicate even more clearly and meaningfully with enhancements and styling changes to the Portfolio Chart, Sunray Diagram, Gantt Chart, and Node Arc Report.
- Enhancements to Technical Architecture Planning and Management: Accelerate building of application APIs and interfaces with improved lifecycle management for components and local components. Include components and information flows in the planning of to-be architectures. Manage the architecture of discovered local components and information flows.
Software AG customers with current Alfabet licenses can download the new release and documentation from Empower.
Figure 1: Here we see an MS Teams channel in the Alfabet Collaboration Panel (top) including the MS Teams collaboration icon indicating the integration configured and available for use. The image middle-left shows part of the conversation and the image bottom-right shows its appearance in MS Teams.
Figure 2: The new integration with Confluence shows real-time views from Alfabet embedded in Confluence wiki pages.