Since ESME is project that has its origins in the community, I thought it would be useful to provide some insights into how the project moved from an idea in Plurk into a real application.
Since most of those involved have/had some relationship to enterprise IT (either from large enterprises themselves, partners providing services for the enterprise or vendors providing software to such customers), there was a real awareness of the requirements of this environment.
Michael Cote described this characteristic in a quote in an article about ESME in Baseline magazine.
“ESME is interesting because of the background of the people building it,” says Red Monk analyst Michael Cote. “Primarily, there are a lot of enterprise software — specifically, ERP — people involved in the project.”
We not only wanted to create a tool that was primarily focused on the enterprise, we also wanted to use the methodologies with which we were familiar. To achieve this goal, we created use cases that were the basis for the initial UI designs. These use cases would be familiar to any analyst who was / is involved in enterprise software.
Usually, this information never makes it to the surface and is buried somewhere in a project archive. ESME is a new sort of open-source project that involves the whole spectrum of roles typical in an enterprise software project but in a community setting. We’ve decided to make a few of these use cases available so that the public can gain better insights into how such projects emerge.
The selected use cases are available for download here.
Please note that some of the use cases included describe functionality that are not currently available. Indeed, the described functionality may surface at a later date in an entirely different form.
