Sorry this took so long to get out. Been traveling a bit.

At the end of our Executive Roundtable that I did with Connie Moore from Forrester, I shared with the attendees my top five new BPM features in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. I thought some of my reader may find this list useful. So here we go...

Number 5: Leverages ASP.Net 2.0 – Developers can leverage ASP.Net 2.0 features in SharePoint based applications. ASP.net 2.0 brings a number of enhancements including Master Pages that allows for visual inheritance, Web Parts that enable end-user customizable controls, Provider Model that allows for integrating custom data stores (as opposed to using AD), New data controls (GridView, FormView, DetailsView), New localization technique, and Personalization services.

Number 4: Web based InfoPath capability with InfoPath Forms Server. Office Forms Server 2007 enables InfoPath2007 form templates designed in InfoPath to be published as ASP.NET Web applications that provide a similar experience to using the InfoPath 2007 client. Now forms based business applications can be shared with customers, partners, or suppliers using only a web browser. Another big benefit is that application user interface (UI) forms can quickly be designed using InfoPath 2007 and then rendered and embedded within the SharePoint application.

Number 3: Integrated workflow built on Windows Workflow Foundation. MOSS 2007 includes user-configurable workflow templates that can guide review and approval processes. Developers and IT administrators can also use Microsoft Visual Studio or SharePoint Designer 2007 to define custom workflows. MOSS 2007 supplies the following workflows:

• Approval
• Collect Feedback
• Collect Signatures
• Disposition Approval
• Issue Tracking
• Translation Management (for publishing with multiple languages)

Office 2007 has also made integrating workflow directly into the Office desktop clients easy for software developers and partners. Now the assigned task, actions, and any data needed to complete a work step can be displayed directly in the Office UI either as a custom ribbon tab or above the document as a task pane.

Number 2: Built-in business intelligence capabilities with Excel Services. Excel Services can be used to display business data as a Web Part where all viewers can see it in a centralized location where the original, posted Excel document is protected from unauthorized changes. Users can still download copies of the spreadsheet to experiment but they can’t modify the original, official version of the document, which is protected as the company’s official business record. This supports the notion of "one of the truth" for a company’s financial data. With Excel Services, the spreadsheet still has the look and feel of the familiar client. Key performance indicators (KPIs), out-of-the-box (OOB) features, and custom calculations are the same as with the Office Excel desktop experience completely through a web browser.

Number 1: The Business Data Catalogue (BDC) supports a declarative approach to surfacing external business data. The Business Data Catalog is a new business integration feature in MOSS 2007. It is a shared service and it enables SharePoint to surface business data from back-end server applications without any coding. The BDC bridges the gap between the portal site and business applications. Key data from various business applications can be brought into SharePoint lists, Web Parts, search, user profiles, and custom applications.

The Business Data Catalog provides built-in support for displaying data from databases and Web services. You can use Business Data Catalog to display data from SAP, Siebel, or other line-of-business (LOB) application via Web services or databases. The Business Data Catalog provides access to the underlying data sources with a declarative metadata model that provides a consistent and simplified client object model. As a bonus, the data brought in by the BDC can included in the SharePoint search index. Now users can search for both unstructured data (documents) and structured data (databases and applications) using a single search and get consolidated results.

Technorati tags: BPM, MOSS+2007, Microsoft, Office 2007, ECM

Sorry for the delay in getting Part 2 out. Anyway, I wanted to continue by sharing some of my slides and some key points regarding practicing Business Process Management (BPM) using a Microsoft platform.

Many of our clients have made investments in Microsoft technologies through enterprise agreements which provide for licensing of Office and SharePoint clients access licenses. In most cases they are running parts of their business on SQL Server and some have made investments in BizTalk.

This stack of .NET based technologies begins to create a rich platform for implementing business process automation solutions that support BPM initiatives for organizations.

The following slide depicts the breadth of business processes.

At one side of the spectrum, you have very ad-hoc and collaborative activities, which tend to be highly unstructured in nature. On the other end, you have activities that are highly structured and transactional in nature – a good example of this is traditional IT business applications and integration middleware. Realistically, business processes tend to blur the lines and span across each category depending on the complexity and scope of the process.

The following slide depicts the Microsoft platform components that address process automation.

With the addition of Windows Workflow Foundation and the work that was done to support surfacing interaction with processes (workflow) within the Office 2007 desktop clients through the business pane uses can interact with their work without leaving the client application. Additional extensions and "hooks" have been provided within SharePoint to bring structured processes into the collaborative user interface. Another noteworthy capability is the InfoPath server which provides the capability to host InfoPath electronic forms and render them (for viewing and complete interaction) purely in a web browser.

This new capability allows designers and developers to expose forms based interfaces within the SharePoint environment or through a web browser easily and quickly. Now these forms can be connected to automated business processes for both data input and the display of process related data and information.

Using these modular and interconnected building blocks along with other .NET based solutions from Microsoft partners, organizations can support BPM using this Microsoft platform.

In Part 3, I will give you my Top Five New BPM Features of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007.

I had the pleasure of co-presenting with Connie Moore, VP & Research Director at Forrester, last week for an invitation-only Executive Roundtable on leveraging Microsoft investments in support of business process management (BPM). The food was great and the discussions even better. I wanted to share some interesting ideas and observations from our event. I will start with some of the key points from Connie’s presentation:

Connie discussed how BPM suites (BPMS) have evolved from two technologies; those that are human-centric coming from traditional document centric workflow and integration-centric BPMS evolving from enterprise application integration (EAI) technologies. She sees continued consolidation in the BPMS market and these two technologies along with their respective strengths coming together and converging.

Connie provided another interesting peak into the future of BPM where she envisions BPMS technologies moving toward self correcting processes. This is an exciting possibility where exception handling and realtime feedback on business process performance can be brought together automatically to make corrections or adjustments to the process on the fly.

Her view of the future based on the continued maturing of technologies that support services oriented architectures (SOA) and the platform software vendors (IBM Microsoft, Oracle) continuing to more tightly integrate BPM and collaborative technologies includes originations enabled to focus on the "whole" process. By using technologies that span the three types of business processes; people, decision, and document intensive processes which in many cases will span across all three can be effectively managed as a continuous process.

In Part 2 of "BPM & Steak: A Great Combo," I will share some of my slides and key points I made regarding supporting BPM by leveraging an investment in Microsoft and Partner technologies. And finally, as a bonus in Part 3 of "BPM & Steak: A Great Combo," I will share my "Top 5 New BPM Features of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007."

This should be interesting to watch. Hat tip to Guy Creese over at Pattern Finder which is were I saw this first. He has a nice post that discusses the announcement made this morning by EMC and Microsoft.

I have been predicting the SharePoint ECM train since November 2003 when I wrote "Document Management For Free" for AIIM E-DOC Magazine.

And, yes I agree that Microsoft is going to partner with anyone that will help them increase sales and revenue regales of their loyalty or perceived commitment to Microsoft. A good example of this was when Microsoft made Open Text their 2006 Global ISV of the Year (Microsoft lingo for Independent Software Vendor) at the World Wide Partner Conference.

I wrote about how this looked to someone familiar with the ECM market and astute enough to read between the lines since Open text had stood side-by-side with Oracle a month earlier at their launch for Content and Records DB.

Let’s see how deep the integration with SharePoint really is and also how the Microsoft field positions EMC: As a partner or competitor?

And what I really would like to see is for EMC to integrate Documentum in the other direction and provide a way for customers to leverage the Documentum workflow and BPM capabilities to workflow enable SharePoint managed documents. This capability is something I have been telling vendors like FileNet and EMC (Documentum) to embrace and provide for years. Let’s see if EMC goes for it.

I am happy to be joining the BPM Enterprise Blogosphere as one of the contributors. My primary area of focus and interest will be addressing and discussing the intersection of BPM and enterprise content management (ECM). There are interesting overlaps here and the ECM market is changing rapidly. This is especially true with the recent announcement by IBM that they are acquiring FileNet.

I have been working in the Workflow and ECM space for over 12 years as a CIO, Product Manager, company president, consultant to leading software companies, author, and speaker. I also was the creator and Product Manager of e.POWER at Integic (Now owned by Northrop Grumman). e.POWER was one of the first integrated workflow/BPM, document and records management suites for building business applications back in 1997.

Today I consult with clients on how to leverage workflow and BPM technologies while effectively managing their content to solve business problems. I specialize in Microsoft based compliance and ECM solutions.

I write about the next generation of these ECM technologies at BetterECM and I look forward to expanding this discussion to include the intersection of BPM here.