Is there any detailed documentation available comparing the functionalities of ARIS 7.1 and ARIS 9.7? We are planning an upgrade and it would be of great help to be able to compare:
1) What was in 7.1 but not in 9.7 anymore?
2) What was in 7.1 and has been further enhanced in 9.7?
Do not make a mistake. You just can trace this community by topics names – only “problem with ARIS 9 connection”, “cannot install ARIS 9”, “bug”, “bug”, “bug”… Do you need it? There are nothing new indeed in this version – only new interface and design of objects a-la ‘pininfarina’ – useless and inconvenient.
And, of course – the time of delivery of product. I cannot say about whole world, but I know it’s problem to buy ARIS in Asia (3 month my client waited for update and then decline the deal), I know about the same problems with delivery in USA, and of course – it’s completely impossible to buy product in Eastern Europe. You know, it’s just like Stone Age – you cannot buy product online, and you need to sign some agreements and after that you should wait months for delivery…
So answering your questions:
1. Stability, time of delivery, price (you’ll be surprised also), quality of support.
2. IMHO, nothing.
3. Nothing. It’s just face lifting with tales about “new” features.
So, you can work with ARIS 7 years and years, some my clients are still using even (!) ARIS 6 and have great results.
Regards
The ARIS Community is actually meant to receive questions from ARIS users about installing and using ARIS. And Software AG appreciates that as most posts are being answered.
However, you won't find posts of customers who have successfully and smoothly migrated from ARIS 7 to ARIS 9, simply because they are happy and have no reason to post here. And we have many of them.
Dear Rune,
First of all it’s wrong assumption that if we have information only about ARIS 7 on our website we didn’t see ARIS 9. We’ve seen it and tested. And we are under preparing the training of ARIS 9. Sorry of course, but I’m of the same opinion about ARIS 9.
About your second question. We don’t know what to do with that page (about partnership) – to erase or to leave. From one hand, we have assigned contract with SAG from 2009 (with IDS from 2005), but from other hand, it is completely impossible to work with your russian division (it’s problem not only of my company). We wrote a lot of letters to your EU office about problems, about propositions to work directly – no one answer for 3 years… So, returning to your question. Of course, it would good to work with company which services you sell, but if it is SAG’s politic for Eastern Europe what can I do, nothing of course
Yes the pricing structure of ARIS has changed so much that the local operations of SAG can't provide a quote in less than 2 days (I have waited more than 3 weeks for a quote), which is totally ridiculous. Normally this took less than 2 hours. The root cause of this is that it seems as if they do not have a fixed pricelist. I work with various ARIS clients in our market and SAG can provide quotes for the same products for two different clients, but the huge price differences between the quotes are baffling.
More baffling is when we tried to buy an add-on component for ARIS 7.2, we were told we can't just buy the SAP add-on for one of the existing Architect licenses the client already owned, but they had to buy a new Architect with the SAP license. What have changed in ARIS' architecture that disables the add-on features that has been a part of ARIS for such a long time. When asked if it is the same for ARIS 9.7 the answer is no, still possible to buy the add-on for ARIS 9.7. WTF? So it seems that even if a client WANT to buy a specific product, SAG will rather walk away from a done deal by inflating the price by more than 3 times what it should be by being inflexible with their pricing and product offerings.
I find ARIS 9.7 slow in corporate environments, especially when using McAfee On access scanner. I takes more than 20 mins to start my LOCAL on my office laptop, but less than a minute on my private laptop... Our server does stop itself every now and again, and I have not been able to figure out why, so I also have stability issues, but so did 7 for that matter.
That said, it would not be fair to advise Deepak not to upgrade at all, or to claim that no new functionalities have been added. The solution has been rebuilt to enable cloud enablement. I believe that ARIS Connect is the way to go, but it comes at a price. What price? Well here it is between $80000 - $120000, depending on the client. There is also the the other new features such as the Table model type, the ad-hoc analysis, etc.
The other thing to consider is that ARIS 7.2 is going to be de-supported from around June 2015. So if you are paying maintenance, and you do not upgrade, you effectively lose you "Investment".
Deepak, you can have a look at my blog for more detail, it is not in the format you are looking for, but should give you some insight.
I am happy that you commented on Alexander's reply with your own experience and advices. After all, everyone posting here on the ARIS Community is seeking for help.
I can't comment on your complain about the local sales team in South Africa. But let me know if you feel they treated you unfairly.
You know that ARIS 7 is no more on sale and reached end of maintenance by end of 2014. But investments in ARIS 7 are NOT lost at all. All ARIS 7 products or add-ons with an ongoing maintenance contract are entitled to receive ARIS 9 products with the same set of features and even some new features, e.g. the spreadsheet models you mentioned and many more.
I enjoy reading your blog about ARIS 9 as it shows your profound knowledge on ARIS 9, e.g. in how to get started on ARIS 9.
McAfee and other anti-virus scanners are known for slowing down any application. As a matter of fact, McAfee is a standard at Software AG. But our IT folks set a McAfee policy to exclude the ARIS folders. I think your IT is able to do the same.
If you have an ongoing issue with an instable ARIS installation the best is to let our support people help you to track down and eliminate the root-cause.
So keep up your good work with and for ARIS, and feel free to post your feedback and concerns right here.
Your question are spanning a very long period of time. The last time ARIS 7 had been updated was Dec 2010. ARIS 9.0 had been released April 2013, and in Feb 2015 we have released ARIS 9.7 SR1. Of course, lots of changes and improvements and new products have been developed in the mean time.
A major concern I often hear from customers, who are saying they are happy with ARIS 7, is that ARIS 9 requires so much more hardware. Well, 5-8 years ago computer hardware was much more expensive and software was less capable. ARIS 9 is based on scalable cloud architecture, enabling customers to easily scale up by expanding their distributed installation without neither the need to reinstall ARIS nor to replace their hardware.
To your questions:
1) "What was in 7.1 but not in 9.7 anymore?"
In general, there no feature lost which you had in ARIS 7.1. Some products/add-ons have been put together in base products. The many different Architects are now mostly so called Extension Packs. But when migrating you won't miss a feature. In fact, you get some new features in Architect, Queries/Ad-hoc Analyses ot name just one.
2) "What was in 7.1 and has been further enhanced in 9.7?"
For ARIS 9 we implemented many ideas from our large customer base to improve ARIS. Just a few points:
Centralized user and license management makes the administration much easier than in ARIS 7
Complex analysis are done by Excel-like spreadsheets but handled as any other model type and to eliminate some report scripts
With ARIS 9 you can work completely browser-based using a new product, ARIS Connect, offering social collaboration for discussing process improvements on the process context, eliminating the need to email model screenshots or reports to keep everyone informed.
And if you want to run ARIS Connect in the cloud instead of installing and administrating it on your premises, then start with ARIS Cloud.
Best would be that you get in contact with Software AG India and ask for remote/onsite presentation matching your current scope of using ARIS 7 and discussing the potential of ARIS 9 to make your job as process manager easier.
Thanks for your response. You are right in saying that it is a quite a jump from 7.1 to 9.7 and hence direct comparisons will not be available. Will go through the links you have provided and get back if I have any further queries.
I was going through this thread and found it very interesting. I have been working on ARIS 7 all these years and now my client is planning an upgrade to ARIS 9. I have not seen the product in detail yet but would like to ask you a simple question. Having had a significant experience in working with ARIS 7 would my transition to ARIS 9 be smooth as well? Do people who have worked with ARIS 7 find it easy to work with ARIS 9 as well? Looking forward to your expert views.
Yes, in-depth modelers as well as pure process consumers find it easy to migrate from ARIS 7 to 9. For ARIS Business Designer/Architects 7.x migrating to ARIS Designer/Architect 9.x we provide so called Interactive Guides to find quickly their way through the new ribbons and different context menus:
Don't miss the chance to get to know ARIS Connect Server, which comes, among many other new capabilities, with browser-based modeling client (ARIS Connect Designer). It provides a convenient way way to "switch" by one mouse click from consuming published process content (as you know it from ARIS Business Publisher) to a modeler simplified compared to ARIS Architect.
I work in management consultancy firm and we just heard about aris software. can someone please illustrate the features of aris software and why it is better than visio.
