Metastorm updates its BPM suite with Vista in mind

Metastorm will offer tools as Vista Gadgets

Business Process Management (BPM) specialist Metastorm yesterday unveiled a major new product roadmap designed to bolster its suite's reporting and modelling capabilities, enhance integration with Microsoft Office 2007 and Vista, and improve support for service oriented architecture (SOA) environments.

Greg Carter, chief technology officer at Metastorm, said the aim of the update was to ensure that BPM or workflow tools are used right across the enterprise, rather than in individual departments, and that non-technical users find it easier to create and manage automated business processes.

Specifically, Carter said tighter integration with Microsoft Office 2007 and Vista will be available from the end of March in the form of a new Office client, and support for Vista Gadgets and the Office 2007 Ribbon designed to enable real time monitoring of processes.

The company said the new client would allow knowledge workers to "engage in collaborative processes and perform work directly from Office 2007 applications like Excel, Word and Outlook, without the need to access a separate process view or task list application."

Carter said the company also plans to embark on a series of updates throughout the year - beginning at the end of the first quarter - designed to enhance integration between its BPM suite and various middleware technologies such as web services, Java and .Net. He added that bringing BPM functionality to these middleware environments would help firms manage their SOA developments.

"As SOA has taken off we're seeing firms build service repositories," Carter explained. "BPM helps you weave those services together into a clear business process that people within the business can interact with."

Separately, Metastorm said it would also enhance its process modelling and reporting functionality this summer, enhancing the "look and feel" of its process modelling suite and adding new scorecard and baseline monitoring reporting capabilities designed to help users monitor how processes are performing against strategic targets.