Microsoft BPM Technologies

Microsoft has a range of offerings that fall under the umbrella of BPM technology. For Microsoft’s customers, these technologies can provide direct solutions to process problems. For independent software vendors (ISVs), Microsoft’s BPM technologies act as a platform for building more specialized solutions. This paper presents a big-picture view of the area, looking at both Microsoft offerings and complementary partner products. The intent is to provide a technology overview of BPM in the Microsoft world.

As with the definition of BPM itself, reasonable people can disagree about exactly which technologies should be included under this heading. Still, there’s broad consensus that the essentials include the following:

• Technologies for defining and executing human workflows, which are processes that connect people. Providing automated support for human-oriented processes is a fundamental aspect of BPM, as are the graphical tools used to define those processes.
• Technologies for defining and executing system workflows, which are processes that connect software. Supporting these automated interactions among applications is another fundamental part of BPM, and it again includes graphical tools to define those interactions. Integration technologies are often included here as well, such as adapters for connecting to diverse systems and tools for defining data transformations. The ability to combine human and system workflows is also important, since many business processes involve both.
• Business rules engines (BREs). If decisions made by a business process can be expressed as a set of rules, a BRE can frequently be used to make those decisions in software. Doing this can help decision making be faster, cheaper, and more consistent.
• Business activity monitoring (BAM). The people who rely on a business process can often benefit from visibility into currently running instances of that process. BAM provides this visibility, exposing relevant information about running processes in terms that are meaningful to the information workers who use it.
• Process description tools: Having a clear understanding of a business process commonly starts with a picture of that process. Graphical tools for illustrating the actions and relationships in a process are useful for creating this picture.

Microsoft’s primary BPM technologies fit quite well into these five categories. Those technologies are the following:

• Human workflow: Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Server.
• System workflow: BizTalk Server, which provides integration services as well. It can also be used with Windows SharePoint Services and other products to create combined human and system workflows.
• Business rules engine: BizTalk Server’s BRE. Microsoft also provides a rules engine with Windows Workflow Foundation, part of the .NET Framework 3.0.
• Business activity monitoring: BizTalk Server’s BAM, together with technologies such as Microsoft Excel and Office PerformancePoint Server for displaying BAM information.
• Process description tools: Microsoft Visio.

Microsoft’s BPM technologies are directly useful for improving business processes. In quite a few cases, however, organizations can also benefit from complementary products that others have built for Microsoft’s BPM platform.