We are excited to announce the availability of toolkits for Tangram Pro™! As of today, you have more choices for using the Tangram Pro platform. Whether you want a Designer account for making system diagrams, a Developer account for generating interface code and transform adapters, or a Basic account to simply view what your team is doing, Tangram Pro now provides options to use the toolkit that is right for you.
Why Toolkits?
Until now, we’ve treated Tangram Pro™ as a single product. Users had all of the functionality and features for a single price. We’ve heard all of you who have said that you want choices. We’ve listened when you said that you would rather have only the features that directly support your job to be done, whether that job is designing a software system or implementing that system in code. We’ve also heard you say that different members of your team need different things, and sometimes that is simply to see what the rest of the team is working on. Tangram Pro can help you with all of those jobs to be done, and as of today, you can decide which Tangram Pro™ toolkit best fits your needs.
Designer Toolkit
Sometimes you need a diagram of your software system. You want this diagram to have meaning and relevance to your implementation – something more than just a sketch drawing – but also be something that can be created collaboratively with your team and quickly without a steep learning curve. The Designer toolkit was created for just this purpose. Diagrams created in Designer have semantic meaning beyond just simple boxes and lines, but you don’t have to be an expert in systems engineering to make them. Drag and drop, specify your data formats, connect the components, and you are done. Your team can work on a design collaboratively from wherever they are, and you can connect those components in your diagram directly to your code repositories. Need to download a picture for your presentation? There’s a button for that too. Anything created by a Designer can be accessed by your team members that are using Developer or Basic accounts, allowing design work to be shared easily across your team.
Developer Toolkit
As a software engineer, it’s exciting to build new things! What isn’t exciting are all of the hurdles you have to jump over to integrate your “new things” with everything else. Creating code for moving data around, making adapters to convert from one format to another, and creating test infrastructure to see how well your system works are necessary but tedious and error-prone activities. Tangram Pro’s Developer toolkit was created to automate the tedious parts of development so that engineers can focus on the critical parts of their systems. Do you need a modular, reusable library for sending and receiving data in an arbitrary data format? Developer generates that code for you and makes it look like you wrote it by hand. Wish you had an adapter to convert between an open architecture standard and a legacy data format? Developer can generate that for you too. Want a quick way to run your software without having to build a test environment? Developer can create a networked, containerized environment for your testing on the fly. The Developer toolkit is designed to empower you to spend more time developing your software and less time trying to integrate your software to other systems.
Free Basic Accounts
If you are a project manager who collaborates with a technical team, it can be hard to stay connected to the team’s work. Ensuring everyone has the same understanding of what is being built and maintaining visibility of the team’s progress is difficult. Basic accounts in Tangram Pro™ make this easier by giving you read-only access to team projects built with the Designer and Developer toolkits. Like what you see and want to test drive some of the features of Designer yourself? Basic accounts can also create individual design projects in a private workspace. Need to be more hands-on with your team’s work in progress? Basic accounts can easily be upgraded to Designer or Developer accounts. We think transparency and visibility is so important that we are giving every Tangram Pro instance the ability to have unlimited Basic accounts for free. It really is that simple: give as many people access to your team projects and data as you want. With Basic accounts, the power of sharing and scaling your data is in your hands.
Hosting Choices
Supporting the critical missions of our DoD customers and partners in the defense industry means that flexibility is key. As a cloud-native platform, Tangram Pro is built for that flexibility. Sometimes you want the easy path of having instant access to an environment managed by someone with experience in secure cloud environments and other times your security requirements force you to host software on premise. Regardless of your requirements, we can support your needs. If you want the easy button of a ready-to-go environment that is safe for unclassified ITAR and CUI data, Tangram Flex can host it for you in our AWS GovCloud. Need your engineering tools in your own environment to meet security requirements? Our team can help you get it deployed there too. Regardless of what your program needs, Tangram Pro™ is ready to go where you need it.
Exciting Future
Today’s toolkit announcement is an exciting milestone in an exciting year for Tangram Flex. You now have more choices, and we are better able to give you what you need. We aren’t stopping here, though; we have much more planned in 2023. Expect to see enhanced versions of the toolkits you see today with exciting new features, and don’t be surprised if you hear about new toolkits too. We are going to keep learning, adapting, listening, and making Tangram Pro™ better!
