Resource Center

What is the Resource Center application?

The Resource Center is one of the web applications that is part of Dragon1.

It supports creating an internal website to publish documents for you and stakeholders. You can use the Resource Center to build an Intranet, Extranet, or Semantic Wiki for all the architecture products.

Below you see an example out-of-the-box version of an Architecture Intranet on Dragon1:

The other applications on the Dragon1 platform you can use to create products like documents or content in collaboration. The Resource Center you can use to publish the documents and content.

The Resource Center often contains something like an Architecture Intranet. Every stakeholder can log in and read, view, and watch the strategies, policy documents, reference models, (open) standards, business models, architectures, and projects that work with architecture.

Enterprise Architecture Dossier and Maturity Level 1

The Resource Center is vital in publishing architecture documents that are part of the Enterprise Architecture Dossier. You make it easy for stakeholders to access the documents and provide feedback on working with the architecture documents in projects.

One of the benefits of using Dragon1 and the Resource Center to communicate the Enterprise Architecture Dossier is that it is no longer dependent on a single person.

Organizations that make use of Dragon1 are more likely to improve working with architecture to the next maturity level.

Enterprise Content Management and Document Management

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is about the management and storage of documents about the organization and the processes and other content.

The Resource Center enables Enterprise Content Management and Document Management. Like you, we are used to working with SharePoint, Alfresco, and other CMS and DMS systems. More information about Enterprise Content Management can be found at Wikipedia.

Because Dragon1 is cloud-based, you can collaborate worldwide with your teams in different locations and time zones on a single data set.

Dragon1 Resource Center as Wiki, Portal, or Intranet

The Dragon1 Resource Center is often used as a Wiki, Portal, or Intranet. You can define any main pages and subpages you like and link to documents on strategies, policies, processes, products, services, projects, and anything else on Dragon1.

The Resource Center can be styled in any color scheme to match your corporate standards. Also, the Resource Center can be switched into Wiki mode and Portal mode. In the portal mode, the Resource Center can be used to give access to other applications outside of Dragon1 on your network or intranet via URL linking.

The benefit of doing this is you can work using a single source of truth. No more using different and maybe wrong versions of documents. If there are multiple versions of documents around, place them together as a different version of a document on a Resource Center page.

Dragon1 provides an online help file supporting you in defining and inserting HTML 5 data blocks and Excel/XML-based page information files. Also, some names and data of columns in a spreadsheet-page information file are interpreted like color, width, usernames, content types, categories, and tags. See for yourself how brilliantly this works!

Dragon1 Enterprise Search

In Dragon1, a search module makes finding information easy. Click search on the top menu bar and type in what you want. The Enterprise Search also searches the content of your Resource Center, so you will never create duplicate content anymore or send emails duplicating files and generating data.

Overview of Basic Features

Below is an overview of the basic features of the Resource Center:

Default Editable contents

Dragon1 Resource Center is preconfigured for you with editable content. There is a page with strategy documents, policy documents, a way of working with enterprise architecture, and other information you might need for an architecture or project team to collaborate.

Architecture Teams and Project Teams often place their team

Watch as we go through the default content of Resource Center in this video.

Creating as Enterprise Architect, Manager, or CIO your page in the Resource Center with background information or input for architecture design is easy.

Create a page with background information

Creating as Enterprise Architect, Manager, or CIO your page in the Resource Center with background information or input for architecture design is easy. Without knowing HTML, you can type in text and markup text like you are used to using MS Word or another text editor.

How to create template web pages / semantic wiki pages

In Dragon1, data content and data layout can be separated. If you want, you can mix the content and layout of data, but you can also separate them so different people or jobs can collaborate.

How does this work?

Like its name, the Resource Center is a center of resources. Every webpage in the Resource Center should give a group of users access to various versions of certain sources, resourcing them. And, of course, mentioning the original location.

Let's say you, as a manager, want enterprise architects to design a system architecture for the new information system for the marketing and sales department. You want these enterprise architects to have an overview and insights into the company's marketing on a need-to-know basis. In this case, you create a webpage for marketing resources.

You need to do only four things:

1. Collect all the documents and data you want to publish on the webpage (a main page and subpages)
2. Upload the documents and data, if necessary, to the application in a public or private (not accessible from the internet) folder. If you want, you can create a link from the Resource Center webpage to a document or data (SOAP/web service) if it has a local or internet URL (http(s) or file).
3. Create a main page and subpages in the Resource Center and enter layout information for data content blocks. This is in HTML 5, and users can use the HTML Block Insert on the right-hand side for basic html blocks and edit them to their liking.
4. Create per data content block page, information files (in an excel, csv, or xml file) that contain the information you want to be shown as text, lists, models, diagrams, or graphs on the webpage.

Now you are finished creating your first Resource Center webpage.

Suppose, over time, the content in the marketing documents or data changes. You will only need to update local documents and the page information files and NOT need to change the HTML 5 layout information.

If you like, you also have smartphone access to this information anywhere, anytime, anyplace. You can use your phone's browser to log in and access the Resource Center page. Dragon1 is built with a responsive design, giving you a web 3.0 experience.

With the Resource Center, you can collaborate easily when teams are located in different countries and time zones.

Per document, you can note how the enterprise architects in the application should use it to create architecture products. The enterprise architects or project architects, on their part, can read and write down here how they have used it, updating their page information file.

And as with architects, do not forget to add a glossary with terms and definitions to rule out a basic cross-field of science misunderstandings.