SharePoint

十二12

SharePoint - Integrated BPM and Workflow Evaluation
　　03/01/2005 - Over the past month or so I have had the opportunity to evaluate many business process management solutions.  This is a new initiative that I have been recently tasked with.  In this article, I will be giving you an idea of what I have found to date.
　　
　　As with any evaluation process, the first thing to do is eliminate the products that do not fit within your base requirements.  I found this to be quite simple; our fundamental requirements are as follows:
　　
　　The product must provide…
　　

a graphical user interface giving non-developer business analyst the ability to create process workflows. the ability to add or extend workflow process actions using the Microsoft .NET platform. integration in core Microsoft infrastructure. administrative tools to facilitate the development, management and deployment of workflow processes. integration with Active Directory.  Our environment uses AD OU's extensively and we cannot administer this information in more than one location. integration with SharePoint; both WSS and SPS.  This integration must include:
the ability to trigger workflow process events from both document libraries and lists, the ability to create and manage workspaces, the ability to upload, move and copy documents,

• the ability to update, move, copy and delete list items.
  
integration with Microsoft Office tools, including InfoPath.  This integration must include the ability to extract information from documents/forms for use in workflow process decisions.

• a minimal set of built in reports giving us the ability to view running processes, process bottlenecks and optimization points, etc.
  

　　
　　Note: this is a very high-level list of requirements, my evaluation process includes more than 200 specific items.
　　
　　Before I describe what I have learned thus far, I must say that I have been extremely impressed with the functionality these products provide.  The feature set/cost ratio is absolutely amazing.
　　
　　03/24/2005 - I am receiving a lot of feedback from the product vendors and will be updating this article until the evaluation is complete.  The vendor specific updates are dated and text is colored in blue.
　　
　　Next to each product and high-level requirement, I have included a ranking that indicates how well our particular needs have been satisfied.  A simple ranking scale of 1 to 10 is used; 1 being low and 10 being high.
　　
　　
　　Skelta Workflow.NET 2004 with SharePoint Accelerator
　　Overall Product Ranking: 6.1

　　I found the Skelta solution to have many outstanding features that included deep integration with Microsoft Office and SharePoint.
　　
　　Workflow Designer
　　Ranking: 4
　　The workflow designer is purely browser based and does not require the deployment of any desktop software; including ActiveX controls.  The user interface is clean and easy to use but does require refreshing which adds a level of latency in response.
　　
　　Being a browser based designer, there are no additional licensing fees for those who wish to create and manage workflows.  Any WSS site administrator has the permissions to create their own workflow process and deploy it to the server.  In some business circumstances this could be a positive feature; not in ours.  There is a fundamental issue with regards to who owns business processes and who should control their deployment.  In general, key management personnel own business processes and IT must be responsible for deployment.
　　
　　03/23/2005 - Update from Skelta
　　The Refresh on the Process Designer as you have rightly expressed is due to the nature of it being completely web based and since we persist each and every move into the database, it causes a refresh after every move. We are going to get over this problem in our next release scheduled for late Q2 or early Q3. How we do this is by caching the transactions as a local copy and reduce the refreshes to a minimal absolutely required level. We will also have enhancements in the way you view the process definition by having collapsible sections of bunched actions and user controlled links. The next version will also come with icon based drag & drop features for Workflow Definition and Dynamic linking between these actions.
　　
　　Product Extensibility
　　Ranking: 9
　　The Skelta product is built, from ground up, in .NET and can be completely extended using the same.  I have not personally seen the SDK but am told new workflow process actions can be created as .NET classes.  The developer simply implements a specific interface and business logic, compiles the code and deploys it to the workflow engine server.  I am told the deployment process is as simple as adding the new assembly and updating configuration file(s).
　　
　　Microsoft Platform
　　Ranking: 8
　　The product is built on Microsoft .NET, XML and Web Services technologies.  The workflow engine can run on virtually any Microsoft server, 2003 is not required.  The only addition software requirement is the .NET framework runtime.
　　
　　Workflow Administration
　　Ranking: 2
　　As I indicated in the workflow designer section above, I have concerns with the limited ability to administer workflow processes.  Your environment may differ from ours; I could not imagine giving "everyday" site administrators the ability to create and deploy workflow processes.  Instant mayhem comes to mind!
　　
　　In addition, workflow processes are maintained in a database which limits our ability to manage them from a historical perspective; such as you would code.  The inability to roll-back workflow processes could prove to cause problems during the development and optimization phase.
　　
　　03/23/2005 - Update from Skelta
　　The Administration part is something we haven't touched upon in great detail in our Demonstrations of the product on both occasions. We were more intent upon demonstrating the functionality provided and that is what we gave more importance. In a version ready for deployment (but not updated on the Demo Server, yet), we have a Central Administration Console which helps you identify Individuals or Groups and allocate permissions on the lines of permissions in Unix (read/write/edit/delete etc). You can grant permissions and specify who can access the Workflow definitions in what capacity and it is extremely elaborate and provides all tools you need for Administration.
　　
　　Active Directory Integration
　　Ranking: 5
　　The Skelta product has very tight integration with Active Directory.  The product does not require you to manage any additional user profile database information.  Changes to AD organizational units are immediately reflected in workflow processing.
　　
　　03/23/2005 - Update from Skelta
That is not where it stops. Skelta can also help you query Active Directory for information on any user and that can be used in your workflow routing logic.
　　What Skelta can also help you do is to connect with additional data sources like your own custom application database and get a nice unified view of all of this data so that you can mix and match and use all of these attributes coming from different data sources in your workflow.

　　SharePoint Integration
　　Ranking: 8
　　I was personally very impressed with the level of SharePoint integration.  Many of the features are described on the Skelta web site:
　　http://www.skelta.com/products/sps/sharepoint-workflow.aspx?y=moreinfo
　　
　　These features are all available through the "drag and drop" user interface and do not require any development.
　　
　　Another point to note here; the Skelta SharePoint Accelerator supports the ability to trigger a workflow process from both document library and list events.  Not all products I have evaluated support triggers from list items.
　　
　　Microsoft Office Integration
　　Ranking: 6
　　The Skelta product has a rich set of workflow process action items to integrate with Microsoft Office tools.  The core product has the built in ability to interact with XML data which lends itself to extracting information from InfoPath and use it in processing and branching logic.
　　
　　The primary reason this feature was not ranked higher was the lack of built in support for directly extracting information from Word documents, such as properties, for use in workflow processing.  This can be accomplished by the product but does require a minimal amount of development.
　　
　　03/23/2005 - Update from Skelta
　　Like you have mentioned, Skelta is very extensible. Yes, Reading out of Word documents can be easily achieved by a little custom coding.. Word documents are inherently not structured documents , so, any logic that we might implement to extract from a word document would force you as the user to stick to our definition of how a document is to be structured J. Yes, one of the approaches could be to extract from a word documents all of the bookmarks that you can specify and that can be built for you extremely fast.

What Skelta can also achieve you do is to extract data from multiple different structured data sources like Excel Sheet etc and can also connect to a SQL linked server which means that you can get information from just about any structured data source.
　　
　　Reporting
　　Ranking: 7
　　A rich set of reports is provided "out of the box".  In addition, custom reports can be developed by directly accessing the SQL database or calling SOAP Web Services.

　　
　　Captaris Business Process Workflow
　　03/25/2005 - Captaris backed out of the evaluation and are no longer being considered.
　　
　　
　　K2.net 2003 Enterprise Workfloww
　　Overall Product Ranking: 7.25

　　Workflow Designer
　　Ranking: 7
　　The K2.net workflow designer is a rich client application (IDE) with a look and feel similar to Visio and .NET IDE.  I found the user interface easy to understand and will be familiar to most.
　　
　　Unfortunately there is no integrated debugger.
　　
　　Product Extensibility
　　Ranking: 8
　　Feature for feature, this product is similar to all of the others I am evaluating.  Built entirely on Microsoft .NET technologies.
　　
　　I have not yet seen any SDK documentation that describes how the workflow engine itself can be extended; such as adding new workflow action types.
　　
　　03/18/2005 - My article regarding this evaluation and the integration with BizTalk Server titled SharePoint/BPM - Updates and BizTalk, generated some feedback from Steven Collier and others.  You can read the comments here.  I forwarded these comments to my representative with K2.net and received the following response:
　　“In our current release we integrate tightly with BizTalk Server 2004, but do not use HWS to do so.  It is on a Adapter, BRE and BAM level.  We have some integration points via HWS, but also realize that there may be a very different direction for HWS in the future.“
　　
　　Microsoft Platform
　　Ranking: 7
　　As indicated above, this product is also built on Microsoft .NET technologies and fits well in our environment.
　　
　　The limited documentation I do have does not make any reference to accessing the workflow engine via Web Services.
　　
　　Workflow Administration
　　Ranking: 7
　　The K2.net product has, by far, the best administrative abilities with regards to managing workflow processes.  Workflow processes are managed in project files similar to the .NET IDE which lends them to source code control.  In addition, the product itself can be used to implement workflow processes around the deployment of projects.
　　
　　Active Directory Integration
　　Ranking: 8
　　The K2.net Active Directory integration is, by far, the best out of products currently being evaluated.  All workflow process steps that require information about users is retrieved from Active Directory; none of this information is cached by K2.net at all.  Organizational Units maintained in Active Directory are also used for process routing, escalation, alerting, etc.
　　
　　The K2.net workflow designer provides an easy to use interface for interacting with Active Directory during the implementation process.
　　
　　SharePoint Integration
　　Ranking: 8
　　The K2.net product provides feature rich and extensive integration with SharePoint.  This feature set is very comparable with the Skelta product.  Virtually every aspect of SharePoint can be accessed including document libraries, lists, workspaces, etc.  Workflow processes can be triggered from both document libraries and lists.
　　
　　The feature set can be found on the K2.net web site at:
　　http://www.k2workflow.com/solutions/collaboration/sharepoint.aspx
　　
　　Microsoft Office Integration
　　Ranking: 6
　　I am most impressed with the K2.net Microsoft Office integration features.  An example of this integration is; uploading a document to a SharePoint document library, your process action can extract information from the document and store it any list item.  In addition, a workflow process can spawn a new SharePoint workspace to be used for document collaboration.  Once the collaboration process is complete, the document publishing process can be automated.
　　
　　Reporting
　　Ranking: 7
　　The K2.net product has a rich set of reports out of the box.  I was especially impressed with the ability to drill down into processes and determine where bottlenecks exist.
　　
　　K2.net provides a fully documented ERD for their database so extending our reporting needs can be simplified.

　　
　　Ascentn BPM System
　　
　　Overall Product Ranking: 6.1

　　Workflow Designer
　　Ranking: 9
　　The Ascentn workflow designer is built as an addin to Visio.  Without question, using this approach to create workflows has many benefits and places this designer at the top of my list.
　　
　　Unfortunately there is no integrated debugger.
　　
　　Product Extensibility
　　Ranking: 8
　　Feature for feature, this product is similar to all of the others I am evaluating.  Built entirely on Microsoft .NET technologies.
　　
　　I have not yet seen any SDK documentation that describes how the workflow engine itself can be extended; such as adding new workflow action types.
　　
　　

　　　　Microsoft Platform
　　Ranking: 7
　　As indicated above, this product is also built on Microsoft .NET technologies and fits well in our environment.
　　
　　The limited documentation I do have does not make any reference to accessing the workflow engine via Web Services.
　　
　　Workflow Administration
　　Ranking: 7
　　The Ascentn product has all workflow administration, including version control, built directly into their product.
　　
　　
　　Active Directory Integration
　　Ranking: 4
　　I was disappointed in the lack of direct integration with Active Directory.  The Ascentn product requires you to synchronize Active Directory with their database; which can be done at automatically scheduled intervals.  I am curious to see how long such a synchronization process will take, what impact it has on performance and server resource utilization and the runtime operation of the product.
　　
　　SharePoint Integration
　　Ranking: 5
　　The Ascentn product provides a number of built in workflow actions that allow you to directly interact with SharePoint.  In comparison with other products, such as Skelta and K2.net, the features are limited.  Our Ascentn representative did indicate the source code for all SharePoint workflow actions would be made available for our modification and to use as a baseline for creating new actions.
　　
　　Microsoft Office Integration
　　Ranking: 4
　　The Ascentn product demonstrated deep integration with InfoPath but I was not able to see any integration points with other Microsoft Office products.
　　
　　Reporting
　　Ranking: 5
　　The Ascentn product provides a limited set of reports out of the box.  However, as with K2.net, their graphical report set for workflow monitoring and optimization is well featured.
　　

　　In Summary
　　
　　Make sure you have done a thorough internal investigation into your specific needs, then be prepared for your project to grow very quickly.
　　
　　Do not underestimate the business process ownership issues you may encounter.  Consider who should have the ability to create and maintain critical business processes.  Make sure to evaluate products that satisfy your specific deployment needs.
　　
　　As I indicated at the beginning of this article, I have been extremely impressed with the rich features these products have available today.  Depending on the size of your environment and specific BPM needs, you can purchase one of these solutions for as low as $4000.  As with any enterprise product, the pricing models vary and can reach 50k-100k.  With a little ROI investigation you may find obtaining budget for you project quite simple.
　　
　　As I continue with my evaluation process, I will keep my blog up to date.  I am interested in your comments.  Have you evaluated any of these products?  Are there others I should be looking at?