Author: Leonor Ciarlone (Page 8 of 13)

There’s no doubt that Microsoft understands the value and opportunity in the ECM/BPM intersection. It is also clear that the roads MOSS will use to get there are not confined to small neighborhoods, hence the reference to the U.S.’ most famous highway.

Microsoft’s significant investments in workflow and business intelligence have been widely reported. I’ll leave the work of dissecting components such as Windows Workflow Foundation, Excel Services, and MOSS BI web parts to resources such as Ziff Davis’ Microsoft Watch and Russ Stalters’ BetterECM blogs as well as Microsoft resources from the SharePoint Product Group and Customer Experience Team (although this one does not show much action since the summer’s LOBi (line-of-business interoperability) announcement.

Blogging over at BPMEnterprise.com, Stalters also has an excellent 3-part series called BPM and Steak: A Great Combo, the latest of which pinpoints MOSS capabilities designed for BPM practitioners. Microsoft’s strategy for full-scale ECM/BPM however, requires somewhat of a “detour” from MOSS and Office 2007 suburbs. The roadmap is evident via multiple, alliance-driven crossroads. Avenues include “Gold Certified” partners such as Bluespring Software, Global 360, Lombardi Software, and Ultimus as well as “Certified” or “Registered” partners such as Savvion and Appian.

Implementing integrations with some of these products does not appear to be fraught with “Exit here” or “In Construction” signposts. (And given all in the “Gold Certified” group are private, one can’t help wondering if there’s an acquisition strategy in the works. I digress…) Rather many are direct and well-embedded crossroads between MOSS and Office 2007, targeted directly at business users.

Case in point: Bluespring’s BPM Suite 4.5, the result of a decidedly Microsoft-centric BPM play that began in 2003. Most interesting to me is the 4.5 focus on “document manipulation,” highlighted multiple times during my briefing with the company. Capabilities include rules-driven analysis, extraction, and dynamic assembly of content from Word, Excel and InfoPath — with PDF thrown in for good measure. Although many ECM players have been doing “ETL for content” for years, this is not common expertise in the BPM market. In a content-centric BPM application such as compliance, this certainly provides some interesting opportunities for aggregated, context-specific reporting.

As I noted in my last ECM-BPM checkpoint, there are multiple road signs (quickly becoming billboards…) that signal technology convergence and deeper integrations between two blurring market segments. Microsoft’s Route 66 strategy is surely one of them.

Bluespring Software announced the general availability of BPM Suite 4.5. Technical highlights include Microsoft Office 2007 integration, WSS 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 integration, PDF Form support, and SQL reporting services adoption. Expanded Microsoft integrations enable users to dynamically create Excel 2007 files, Word 2007 documents and InfoPath 2007 forms with any data moving throughout the process, including reading from Excel, Word, InfoPath, Adobe PDF files, ODBC-compliant databases and Web Services. In addition, Bluespring Web Parts enable users to embed work list management, process monitoring and reporting inside SharePoint pages as well as trigger processes off of SharePoint events and actions on any SharePoint entity. The release also expands the product’s “in-flight” Process Editing capability, delivering process agility by allowing users to edit or change “in-flight” processes resulting from unexpected business cases without requiring code changes, server restarts or needing to wait for all “in-flight” processes to complete. Bluespring’s BPM Suite is 1 of 2 Microsoft Gold Partners whose software products are being featured in the Microsoft Office 2007 launch kit, provided to attendees at 75 North America launch events.

The universal challenge for most companies today is delivering a customer experience that transcends geographical boundaries. And engaging customers regardless of geography and cultural expectations is no small feat. From a content perspective, a significant part of the challenge is defining the relevancy of information provided throughout the customer lifecycle. For non-English consumers, a key facet of relevancy is information in their native language. As Kaija reminds us her blog on Multilingual Terminology, “you can always buy in your own language, but you must sell in your customer’s language.”

As companies expand multinational revenue goals to include emerging markets such as China, India, and Latin America, providing content “in context” becomes even more important. From this perspective, localization strategies for various markets become much more than a cost burden. Rather, they become a driver of competitive advantage and a strong foundation for global brand management. This clearly extends potential benefits way beyond project and product-specific ROI.

Certainly, most companies cannot afford to “just translate everything.” And in fact, mass translation without any prioritization based on geographic market analysis is inevitably a money pit. Think of it this way: geography and culture are both market segments to be evaluated for the revenue, brand presence, and customer base they can provide

That means a localization strategy should have significant amounts of collaboration between departments such as marketing, sales, operations, technical documentation, and customer support. This enables everyone who “touches the customer” to understand market segment goals and priorities. Then, defining the level of translated content provided and where/how it gets used should match corporate goals (in addition to the expectations of the targeted audience!)

And here’s where it gets tricky. We’ve found that the problem for organizations is less about the act of translation itself, and more about aligning the business processes that support it. The good news is that many companies are sharing their challenges, successes, and best practices on tackling this very problem. Check out our Content Technology Works site to read their stories.

This is re-post from our Main Analyst blog by Kaija Poysti on January 8.

Traveling in Europe during the holidays reminded me again on the importance of languages in the European market. With Bulgaria and Romania joining the EU the size of the European market increased yet again – and made it even more language-intensive. American companies wanting to sell to the European market, or outsource their business processes in the quite interesting former Eastern Europe, need to add yet a couple of more languages to be maintained in materials, web sites etc.

For those interested in reading more about the differences of language requirements in Europe, USA, and Asia, and on the solutions being developed for them, provides an interesting European view. With the rapidly growing requirement for faster and cheaper translations, maximal utilization of automation is the only solution to meet the multilingual needs. This will include a shift towards giving end-users more tools to both understand and produce material in other languages. I believe that some of such new tools will come from outside the traditional translation industry: content management, collaboration tools or similar.

One of the big questions will be: can Machine Translation provide a solution? This will be the topic of my next blog.

WebMethods introduced version 7.0 of the webMethods Fabric product suite as well as a new component, webMethods BPMS. The company reports that these releases deliver a fully-unified environment for process development, automation, and monitoring. WebMethods Fabric 7.0 highlights technologies for service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance, while the new BPMS suite concentrates on business user features as well as integrated process monitoring and and enhanced real-time business analytics. Additional webMethods BPMS features include an Eclipse-based process modeling environment for ‘codeless’ development, extensive support for both human-to-human and system-to-system task flow, business rules management and a new semantic metadata library.

Welcome to the Globalization Practice blog. Our goal is to build an online forum for a lively, shared discussion on this topic and hopefully, create an interactive community that encourages readers to ask questions, post opinions, and share best practices. Along with my colleague Mary Laplante, guest blogger Kaija Poysti, and other experts we might invite along the way, we’ll be providing food for thought in areas such as:

• Why globalization as a strategic business practice should be “standard operating procedure” for organizations with multinational revenue goals
• How globalization extends into customer experience and brand management strategies, inevitably impacting far more than content localization processes
• Why a consolidating market forces Language Service Providers to redefine their value proposition
• How translation and content management technologies are closing the gap between fragmented, manual localization processes
• Why globalization compels organizations to rethink traditional content creation methods
• Which standards are helping to integrate globalization processes and meet emerging international requirements

In June 2006, Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria wondered, “How Long Will America Lead the World?” The piece included a familiar discussion of the many technology-driven factors that are driving an “open world economy.” Our globalization practice blog will discuss these factors and their impact on people and process management so that you have knowledge and insight on how to successfully meet the challenges of multi-lingual business communication.

Feel free to post a comment or send me an email with globalization topics that are important to your organization.

Pegasystems announced the latest version of its award-winning SmartBPM Suite. Enhancements focus on providing business users with better access and more precise control over their business processes. New features include Flex-based interactive business visualization, complex business decisioning support, insurance-specific capabilities to manage multi-channel, multi-state policies and rules, SOA integration testing, AJAX and Flex automation, and accessibility features to support all users. The release also adds new accessibility support to meet the requirements imposed by the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Disability Discrimination Act (UK) as well as other accessibility requirements in the EU.