The ORM Foundation

My understanding is that Microsoft does not plan to support ORM modeling in versions of Vision after either 2005 or 2008. It appears they are dropping the Visio for Enterprise Architect line. I was wondering if there are others out there impacted by this and what path forward are they taking? I was considering looking at NORMA, but I wanted to find out what recommendations others might have.

Thanks

They dropped Visio for Enterprise Architects some time ago. That's not news.

I use NORMA. It works pretty well, and supports ORM 2.0.

I can't use either Visio for Enterprise Architect or NORMA at work, so I made an ORM template to use with standard Visio. It's not as fancy as the MS one but it allows me to generate the diagrams very quickly. It also has the advantage that I can represent additional concepts, such as whether or not a value can change over time, and if so whether a history is kept; and colour code according to how an existing model is changed by a project (new, removed, changed, etc).

I do have to write the business rules manually but I have found that this is not such a bad thing (although I really do like NORMA's rules writer). (At work all I can use ORM for is to state the business rules.)

At home I use NORMA.