August 31, 2006
The ECM/BPM Intersection: Infrastructure versus Solutions
The summer of '06 gave credence to the notion that multiple ECM and BPM suite vendors are preparing for the business buyer at the ECM/BPM intersection. Examples include:
June's announcements included EMC/Documentum's acquisition of ProActivity, Metastorm's integration with Documentum, Hummingbird, Interwoven and Meridio -- quickly followed by a major upgrade of its BPMS suite, which includes a strong focus on strengthening its Sharepoint integration. Not to be outdone, Ultimus announced its iBAM Suite, targeting non-technical business users who need visibility into BPM-enabled business processes. The tagline? "Go from Zero to BAM in less than 10 minutes."
July's announcements included one from the open source community, a hot arena across all content technology categories. Describing its offering as the first Zero-Code BPMS, Intalio describes its BPMS 4.2 product as ideal for "complex business processes that include Web Services orchestration and web-based human workflow."
August's IBM-FileNet merger got lots of press and continues to focus on "synergistic BPM technologies." Although this news seemed to overshadow the Oracle-IDS Scheer partnership, this announcement also deserves attention for those following the chase between Oracle, IBM and Tibco Software (who seems to have finally made significant progress in 2006 on maximizing its 2004 Staffware acquisition.
These "catch up" summer activities are strong signals to competing vendors already traveling the path toward meeting the requirements of complex business processes that must combine data-centric BPM integrations (including SOA) with content-centric, human-driven interactions. Players with earlier investments or partnerships supporting this roadmap include BEA's Fuego acquisition in March, the Vignette-Lombardi alliance in April, Interwoven's strategy to bolster visibility for its Fujitsu partnership, and Global 360's steady progress toward "bridging the islands of process automation across BPM, transaction management, ERP and content management systems" by integrating its G360 EX and G360 BOS products.
Now comes the fall and expectations for 2007 products that are not simply infrastructure-ready, but rather solution-specific ready. It is our belief that applying integrated ECM/BPM solutions to real-world issues requires the ability to handle hybrid, complex, and high-volume processes in a manner that enables rapid deployment through ease of use and pre-packaging of vertical or horizontally-specific capabilities including workflow, modeling objects, business rules, and end-user dashboards for monitoring and analytics. This will be critical to vertical uptake in industries such as Banking, Insurance and Telecommunications as well as horizontal arenas such as compliance, claims processing, accounts payable, and human resources.
Some vendors can already point to these capabilities, which ultimately cross the unstructured content and structured data worlds; Others are well on their way to demonstrating them. The fall of 2006 should be an interesting quarter.
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Posted by Leonor Ciarlone at 12:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 11, 2006
Whither InfoPath?
Microsoft's InfoPath was announced with great fanfare in October 2003 as part of the Office 2003 release. Microsoft then included some enhancements to InfoPath in a Service Pack release (SP1) of Office, which was distributed in June 2004. Since then, there has been little news about InfoPath. The InfoPath team blog at the Microsoft Developer Network went quiet in early 2005, with its last post in November of 2005, which was an announcement of an InfoPath 2003 Toolkit for Visual Studio 2005. There is a newish InfoPath tips-and-tricks blog by Microsoft blogger Tim Pash, but other than that, Microsoft has been very quiet about InfoPath. Does this suggest a reduced commitment by Microsoft?
UPDATE: As you can see from the comments, Microsoft appears to be plenty busy with InfoPath. See also this post from Eric Richards, who is a development lead on Microsoft Office.
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Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:14 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
November 24, 2005
eForms and XML
I spent some time yesterday updating my eForms resources page, and I was pleasantly surprised to find a number of new resources out there. I had been thinking the interest had slowed down a bit, but clearly it hasn't. And Happy Thanksgiving to our readers here in the states!
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Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 18, 2005
XForms Wiki
Mark Birbeck's company, x-port.net Ltd., makers of formsPlayer, have launched an XForms Wiki, and they have some seeded it with some good material. Some of the initial content includes tutorials, industry news, reference material, and sample applications.
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Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 8, 2005
Compound XML Document Editor
Every now and then I look at IBM's alphaWorks, their web site for emerging technologies. A recent addition is a Compound XML Document Editor. The Editor is an Eclipse plug-in, and supports multiple namespaces, XForms, SVG, MathML, and a number of other document types.
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Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:15 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 11, 2005
Keynote Debate: Microsoft & Sun: What is the Right XML Strategy for Information Interchange?
I am liveblogging the Keynote Debate between Microsoft and Sun on what is the right strategy for information interchange. The panelists are Tim Bray, Director, Web Technologies, Sun Microsystems, and Jean Paoli, Senior Director, XML Architecture, Microsoft. Jon Udell is moderating.
- Actually Frank Gilbane is moderating, and not Jon, so we will hear some of Jon's thoughts as well
- Frank: the session is really about strategies for sharing, preserving, and integrating document content, especially document content with XML.
- Frank gave some background about the European Union attempts to standardize on Microsoft Office or OpenOffice
- Tim elucidated some requirements of your data format. (1) Technically unencumbered and legally unencumbered (2) High quality (and a notable aspect of quality is allowing a low barrier to entry). Tim: "As Larry Wall (the inventer of Perl) noted, easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible)."
- Jean predicted that by 2010, 75% of new documents will be XML.
- Tim agreed with Jean that 75% of new documents will be XML by 2010, but asked how many of them will be XHTML (as opposed toa more specialized schema, I assume).
- Some agreement by all that electronic forms are an important aspect of XML authoring, but Tim thinks the area is "a mess." I'm paraphrasing, but Tim commented on the official XForms release, "Well, it's official."
- Jean commented that XML-based electronic forms are made more difficult because forms themselves require consideration of graphical user interface, interactivity, and even personalization to a degree. This suggests forms are more complex than documents. (And this reminds me of a comment Mark Birbeck made about there being a fine line between an electronic form and an application.)
- Good question from the audience. So much time has elapsed since SGML got started, and we are still only have XSL-FO (which this person was not happy with). What does this suggest about how long it will take to get better, high-quality typographically sophisticated output?
- Tim would suggest we are seeing some improvement, beginning with better resolution on the screen.
- Another commenter weighed in, suggesting that format is important and format does convey meaning. Would like to hear that the tools are going to get better.
- Frank: when do you need a customized schema?
- Jean: best way to safeguard your data and systems is to have an XML strategy. You can gain efficiencies you never had before. Also suggested that the Microsoft schemas will not somehow trap your content into Microsoft's intellectual property.
- Jon's takeaways: (1) software as service (2) XML-aware repositories and (3) pervasive intermediation (the content flows in such a way that you can intermediate it)
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Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 22, 2005
eForms Resources
I spent some time updating my eForms Resources page, which I have also reformatted and moved to a new location. I used the latest version of Onfolio, which has a few nice new features, including support for Firefox (yes!) and a tool for automatically creating an RSS feed.
One new resource I listed is a blog by Christophe Dumonet, General Manager of the company Unique World Software, developer of InfoView, the InfoPath web viewer that converts InfoPath forms to a form suitable for the Internet.
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Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 6, 2005
XML and Electronic Forms
I haven't updated my eForms Resources page in a while, and I should, as there has been a lot of news lately, including the introduction of Acrobat 7 and Adobe's recent announcement of their LiveCycle Policy Server.
I spent some time today at the formsPlayer Web site. formsPlayer is the XForms technology from UK-based x-port.net Ltd. They have a complete toolkit for developers, but you can also download the player itself for free, and then they have a nice set of example XForms, including ones that combine XForms with SVG.
The installation of formsPlayer requires IE 6, and the latest version of the Microsoft XML parser, but the installation will prompt you for this.
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Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:13 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack