Moving from Visio to Your BPM Suite

Appian hosted a Webcast today on the topic of "Bringing Visio Process Maps to Life Using BPM Suites."

The first part was rather dull -- a primer on business process management. Then things livened up a bit when speaker Dutch Dwight was introduced. He's the COO for Zynium, which makes middleware products for Visio.

His company's latest release is a utility called Byzio Exporter that exports Visio objects to BPM tools. So, if your process maps are embedded in those rather static Visio files, here's a way to move them over to your new BPM suite. (Appian would like it to be Appian Enterprise, but the tool will, I believe, work with any product that supports XPDL and BPEL standards for workflow.)

I would have preferred an actual demonstration rather than the screenshots we were shown. But the idea is this: You simply map the Visio process shapes into the Appian (or other) shapes. From there, you configure the notations the way they need to be and generate the executable code.

The partnership between the two firms was announced in September 2005.

For a 30-day trial, says Dwight, talk with your Appian sales rep.