Everything Atlas can do right now.

Recording what a customer runs, in about five minutes.

This is the only data entry in the product, and everything else is derived from it. There is no import from a CMDB, no discovery agent, and no questionnaire.

• Type-ahead across all 43 elements.Matches on the name, the short code and the product family, so “scheduler”, “SCHED” and “industry” all find something. Built for someone ticking boxes while still on the call.
• Four catalogue starting points.Common estate shapes you apply and then correct, rather than building from nothing. They only offer shapes that make sense at the release you recorded, and applying one lands in the history as a single event rather than twenty.
• The release and the exact build.Both are recorded even though the catalogue resolves to the release and no finer. The fix pack is kept because it is the real answer and it decides more of the next conversation than the minor version does.
• Customer systems alongside IBM products.ERP, GIS, historian, data platform and directory sit on the same drawing as the suite, marked as the customer's word rather than IBM's claim. An architecture that stops at the vendor boundary is not the architecture anybody actually operates.
• As many estates as you have customers.Named, switchable, duplicable. Each one keeps its own dated history of every edit, so the record can say what you changed and when.
• It teaches itself on the way in.A first visit opens a short walkthrough that points at the real controls rather than a video, and the notation — the four evidence states, why family and evidence never share an edge of a card — sits behind a key press from anywhere. Neither blocks the tool, and the walkthrough never reappears once it has run.

Three readings, and only one of them needs a destination.

What to worry about in what they already have

Ranked worst first, because a support line ending outranks an undocumented relationship. It covers the release's own support state, anything deprecated or renamed underneath them, anything the catalogue stops carrying, the constraints that bite this particular estate, and every element that cannot be evidenced. No destination required, which is the point — this is the resident architect's whole job.

What the move actually costs them

Set a target release and the destination opens as their estate carried forward, minus whatever stops being available on the way. From there it is editing: drop what they are retiring, add what they are buying. Atlas then reports what carries unchanged, what carries but changed underneath them, what leaves and why, and what was deliberately added. What the release merely offers is held in a separate list below the plan, because a transport operator does not need Maximo Aviation presented as part of their upgrade.

What moved since you last looked

The catalogue keeps an append-only record of what each claim's evidence looked like at every build. Cross that with the date the estate was recorded and Atlas can say: IBM changed this on the 14th, you recorded it on the 2nd, here is the excerpt as it read on both dates. Every reading states the window it examined, and will tell you it has not been watching long enough rather than report a quiet period it never observed.

A finding looks like this. The sentence is IBM's, quoted rather than summarised, with the page it came from and the day it was read.

A drawing scoped to one customer, at the release they run.

The graph opens on the estate you recorded rather than the whole product line, at their release rather than the newest one. The catalogue stays one click away and says how much bigger it is.

• Three altitudes.Ecosystem, product and detail. Altitude changes the grammar rather than the zoom — which layers are drawn and how much of each element is shown — and every altitude states how many elements it is holding back rather than quietly dropping them.
• Five layers.Infrastructure, suite foundation, application, industry solution and customer systems.
• Two channels that never share geometry.The spine down the left and the glyph answer how do we know this. The rule across the top and the family code answer what kind of thing is it. Both are written as well as coloured, so the sheet survives a black-and-white printer.
• Every line says what it is.REST, OSLC, MIF, Kafka or a direct database read, tagged on the line itself. “These two things are connected” is not an architecture.
• A key that describes this drawing.Not the catalogue — only what is actually on screen, with counts, and it moves when the drawing moves.
• It prints.Landscape, key included, chrome dropped, colour channels forced on so the evidence and family rules survive the printer driver. Paper size is yours to choose.
• A second screen.Pop the drawing into its own window and both windows follow each other, for the meeting where the graph is on the projector and the findings are on your laptop.

Six artefacts, each carrying the evidence behind what it draws.

A diagram is the artefact most likely to end up in a slide deck stripped of the tool that made it, so every format carries the evidence marks and the key that explains them.

There is also a basis-of-design record, which states plainly what is IBM's claim, what is the customer's, what is our judgement, and what nobody has established — and says on its face that it is not a certification or an attestation of anything.

Every customer you hold, ranked by what is closest.

A question you cannot answer one estate at a time. Ranked by nearest date, with what has already passed held apart from what is coming, because the estate you are late for should not hide behind a friendlier number.

Nothing on it is a second copy kept up to date by hand. Every figure is read from the same estates the workspace edits, so a number here cannot quietly disagree with the record it summarises — which is the failure mode of every dashboard built on a duplicate.

Estates move as files. Export one, hand it to a colleague, attach it to a proposal, keep it in the same repository as the design documents it supports. Importing a colleague's file never overwrites your own record of the same customer, and an element the catalogue no longer carries is kept and listed rather than silently dropped. Atlas tells you when an estate has unexported work in it, and only then.

959 published builds, so a fix pack stops being a shrug.

Taken from IBM's own releases index: 959 builds across 18 applications, 8.4 through 9.2.

Record a customer's exact build and Atlas will tell you whether IBM published it, which release line it belongs to, and whether it was reserved for internal use and never released at all. Where a build sits outside the range the register covers, it says the absence means nothing rather than implying the build does not exist.

The classic 7.6.1.x line publishes through a different process which we have not captured, so Atlas reports we did not look rather than reporting those builds absent. Those are different statements and the difference matters to whoever is holding the estate.

Everything above is on this domain.

Record an estate and it stays in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere, there is nothing to sign up for, and you can close the tab without losing it.

Open Atlas V3 → How V3 differs from V2 →