EA Office Integration and eaDocX compared

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Category: Blog Articles

We've been asked by several customers to describe the differences between the function available in Sparx EA Office integration vs eaDocX. So here is a short guide to what makes eaDocX different:

Word integration:

Firstly the User Interface.

We have worked hard to make it  easy for eaDocX users to tailor their documents. We do this by only presenting you with the elements, connectors, stereotypes, attributes and TVs that are in your model rather than the Sparx approach of giving you a list of everything that might be there. And eaDocX lets you tailor and print 99% of the documents you need without the need for scripting or writing code. 

Secondly the Tight Integration with Microsoft Word.

We don't just let you save your document in a Word format. Because Word is embedded inside EA, eaDocX lets you use all the features of Word, the text and table styles formatting, the Word Quick Parts, the fonts and logos... So it's easy to make your generated documents look like every other 'hand crafted' document that your business expects. 

And Thirdly, the "Out-of-the-Box" enhancements that make your eaDocX documents stand out from the crowd.

For example:

• The options available for printing relationship matrices: multiple attributes and TVs available in the source and target fields and choosing which relationship attributes to print in the matrix cells
• Applying conditional formatting when document/model contents are outside a permitted range, or meet a particular criteria, or are missing altogether.
• The document glossary which automatically prints only the terms used in your document which are included in your EA model glossary
• The cross reference reports which include details of the subset of elements referred to elsewhere in the document. 
• etc ...

And Word Import

Yes eaDocX and Sparx EA both do that.

Excel integration:

Sparx has recently added extra features to copy the Excel import / export capability that eaDocX has provided for many years. However their solution works at element level only, whereas eaDocX allows manipulation of elements, attributes and operations between EA and Excel using the import/export functions of eaXL. eaDocX also then provides the option to embed EA data exported to Excel into Word documents by defining worksheet ranges and charts.

PowerPoint integration

Yep, we'll 'fess up to not doing this at all. That's because we focus on making our Word and Excel integrations the best they can be... making eaDocX your in-house document expert.

Integrated Document Collaboration

eaDocX Collaboration edition has this one all to itself. The ability to publish Word documents (we like to think of them as curated views of your model) to the web, to allow contributions from the widest business audience and to have those contributions saved inside your model with full traceability. Enabling stakeholder engagement, improved model quality and accelerated project approvals. Delivering fully integrated EA collaboration on any web-enabled device.

In Summary

Finally, one of our Partners (thank you Guillaume) has produced this comparison diagram which summarises the differences between eaDocX Corporate Edition and the other available EA features. But note, it doesn't show Collaboration features.