Bluesprings BPM Suite 4.2 comprises six components for designing, deploying and managing business processes.
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Bluesprings BPM Suite 4.2 comprises six components for designing, deploying and managing business processes.
BPM Designer is an integrated and easy-to-use process-modeling tool that follows the standard drag-and-drop conventions found in most similar tools.
BPM Designer includes an organization charting tool for managing roles , rather than using a separate tool as Ultimus BPM Suite and other packages do. The Bluespring designer tool also supports geographic modeling, allowing users to create rules that apply to a broad region, such as North America, or a single location, such as a check-processing center.
BPM Designer has a good set of prepackaged objects that support Web services, scripts, subtasks and desktop applications such as Microsofts Excel. During tests, we found it easy to manage action properties, and we could roll back process changes to the previous version.
The Bluespring designer tool doesnt support any standards-based process or workflow description languages, such as BPEL (Business Process Execution Language), but it did allow us to import and export process definitions in XML. This will give business analysts a way to share process designs or hand off mappings for lower-level process development. BPM Designer doesnt include a forms-generation tool, however.
The BPM Engine component is managed through an MMC (Microsoft Management Console)-based tool that allowed us to get a good view of the process state. BPM Suite also allows companies to configure the engine to build concurrent and parallel execution paths for processes.
BPM Suite includes a Web-based task management interface, BPM Web; BPM To Go brings the same task management capabilities to Pocket PC-based devices. Its unlikely that users will use either tool, however, as most tasks are application-driven.
The suite also includes the BPM Operational Dashboard for controlling and monitoring workflow, as well as the BPM Executive Dashboard for viewing workflow performance. The Executive Dashboard allows users to drill down on processes and includes several canned reports and the ability to create custom supports.
Next page: Evaluation Shortlist: Related Products.
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Evaluation Shortlist
Fujitsu Softwares Interstage Business Process Manager 7 Focuses on providing Web services integration with a Web-based design tool (interstage.fujitsu.com)
Pegasystems Inc.s SmartBPM Suite A J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition)-based solution, SmartBPM Suite has a similar focus on standards and enterprise application integration as Interstage BPM (www.pegasystems.com)
Ultimus BPM Suite 7.0 Provides a good set of tools for automating manual tasks at the desktop (www.ultimus.com)
Technical Analyst Michael Caton can be reached at [email protected].
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