Executive Summary

Competitive business scenarios and increasing costs have given rise to the need to rapidly and continuously adapt and streamline business processes, evolve new business values and increase operating efficiency. As organizational processes become increasingly explicit, Business Process Management (BPM) has emerged as a comprehensive solution to model, monitor, simulate and redesign processes for competitive improvement. Business Process Management (BPM) is a systemic approach to improving an organization's business process through collaboration of management and IT techniques.

In order to facilitate development of workflows in applications, Microsoft has introduced Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). Microsoft has also launched Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), which is built on top of WF to cater to the needs of business users. While WF and MOSS offer elementary BPM workflow capabilities, the requirements of enterprise users and developers go beyond native functionality available in these technologies. In this white paper, we examine how Skelta BPM leverages on MOSS and WF to provide advanced BPM Workflow capabilities to developers and enterprises.

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BPM : WF, MOSS and Skelta BPMBPM : WF, MOSS and Skelta BPM

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Introduction

Business Process Management (BPM) is a systemic approach to improving an organization's business process through collaboration of management and IT techniques. For a business user it means a group of processes that can be defined, managed and optimized in an organization. A technical person views BPM as group of technologies focused on defining, executing, and monitoring process logic.

BPM tools focus on four aspects of BPM: process modeling, work flow execution, business rules and business analysis and monitoring. But from a developers perspective workflow becomes important in terms of defining the process logic. Microsoft has targeted to solve the problems of developers by introducing Windows Workflow Foundation enabling elementary workflow capability and built MOSS on top of WF to cater to the BPM needs of business users to some extent.

Windows Workflow Foundation

Windows Workflow Foundation provides a set of .NET classes and services for highly skilled developers enabling elementary workflow capability. It is targeted towards developers and does not cater to the needs of a business analyst. WF is intended to be used for any kind of workflow-based application. It provides a workflow engine, a standard set of activities for defining workflows, and a graphical designer to help developers create workflows and their own custom activities. Windows Workflow Foundation comes with a set of general purpose activities for defining workflows. This base activity library provides the ability to define control flows using familiar constructs such as IF/ELSE and WHILE loops. It also includes a rules engine, support for communicating with other softwares using web service, and more. Windows Workflow Foundation also provides the functionality to create custom activities focused on a particular problem space.

The workflows in the custom activities can be combined with those in the base activity library to create workflows. The creators of custom activities are also free to completely ignore Windows Workflow Foundation's base activity librarythere's no requirement to build on top of them. Windows Workflow Foundation workflows can be written directly in code. Workflows can also be defined graphically, with code added where required. To make this possible, Windows Workflow Foundation provides the Workflow Designer, a tool that allows developers to create and modify workflows. The Workflow Designer can also be hosted in, and customized for, other environments. An ISV that wishes to include workflow within its own offering might host this tool directly inside that product, giving it whatever look and feel is appropriate. Similarly, an organization that wishes to provide a way for information workers to create and modify workflows, could host the Workflow Designer within a more business-friendly environment than Visual Studio. ISVs are also free to create other graphical design tools to work with Windows Workflow Foundation workflowsusing the Workflow Designer isn't required.

What Windows Workflow Foundation does not provide

It is also important to analyze what WF does not provide: direct support for human workflow, such as task lists or forms creation, direct support for system workflow, such as adapters and data transformation. Instead WF is solely focused on defining and executing the workflow logic. It's also important to note that WF provides no host process for workflows, leaving this up to the application developer. WF offers no built-in support for fault tolerance, management, deployment, or other useful aspects of an enterprise application. As its name suggests, this technology is focused on just one thing: workflow.

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WF does not provide direct support for human workflow, such as task lists or forms creation, or direct support for system workflow

WF offers no built-in support for fault tolerance, management, deployment, or other useful aspects of an enterprise application.

Innovating Workflows inside SharePoint

Microsoft SharePoint server offers collaboration and document management functionality by means of web portals, and provides a centralized repository for shared documents, as well as browser-based management and administration of these. It allows creation of Document libraries, which are collections of files that can be shared for collaborative editing. SharePoint provides access control and revision control for documents in a library. It also includes a collection of web parts, which are web widgets that can be embedded into web pages to provide a certain functionality. SharePoint includes web parts such as workspaces and dashboards, navigation tools, lists, alerts (including e-mail alerts), shared calendar, contact lists and discussion boards. It can be configured to return separate content for Intranet, Extranet and Internet locations. It uses a similar permissions model to Microsoft Windows, via groups of users. Active Directory groups can be added to SharePoint groups to easily tie-in permissions. Alternatively, other authentication providers can be added through HTML Forms authentication

Managing Workflow with SharePoint Server

Office SharePoint is tightly integrated with email and web browsers which simplify interaction between people with content process and business data. It also has out-of-the-box workflows for initiating, tracking and reviewing common business activities such as document review ,tracking status, authorization ,signature collection . Businesses can easily modify these out-of-the-box workflows or design their own workflow process by using familiar Microsoft tools such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer (the next generation Microsoft Office FrontPage) or Microsoft Visual Studio development system.

MOSS out-of-the-box workflow includes:

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Approval: Routes a document for approval. Approvers can approve or reject the document, reassign the approval task, or request changes to the document.

Collect Feedback: Routes a document for review. Reviewers can provide feedback, which is compiled and sent to the document owner when the workflow has completed.

Collect Signatures: Gathers signatures needed to complete an Office document. This workflow can be started only from within an Office client.

Disposition Approval: Manages document expiration and retention by allowing participants to decide whether to retain or delete expired documents.

Group Approval: Similar to the Approval workflow, but uses a designated document library and offers a personalized view of the approval process(es) in which a user is participating. This workflow provides a hierarchical organization chart from which to select the approvers and allows the approvers to use a stamp control instead of a signature. This solution was designed specifically for East Asian Markets.

Translation Management: Manages document translation by creating copies of the document to be translated and assigning translation tasks to translators.

Issue Tracking: Manages the issue tracking process by creating tasks for active issues assigned to users who own a given issue. When the task related to an issue is complete hence resolving the issue, the creator of the issue is assigned a review task so that the issue can be closed.

Do We Still Need Workflow solutions?

Has Office SharePoint wiped out the need of workflow solutions?

The answer is No. Let's see why?

?Workflows created inside SharePoint Designer are not reusable and bound to list?Conditional logic that can be applied to workflows is limited ?Does not have the ability to debug?Escalation of processes cannot be configured in the workflow. For example if there is one manager who has to approve leave

and he is absent one cannot timestamp the process to move it to the next level of senior manager for approval after the specified period of time?Designing of multi-step workflows with visual studio is difficult. Robust audit and metric data has to be built-up?Integration with other platforms has to be built from scratch

Skelta BPM & MOSS

Skelta BPM integrates seamlessly with the SharePoint platform. The following figures illustrate how Skelta enhances the business value of MOSS.

Fig. 1.0 Building Workflow Solutions in MOSS

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MOSS excels when it comes to helping business users build workflows with low complexity. Examples of such workflows are document approval and signature collection. Such workflows can be designed using in built available templates, or by using Microsoft SharePoint Designer.

Designing workflow applications with higher levels of complexity requires more effort and technical skill. Examples of such processes are leave management, expense declarations and other employee self-service applications. Such implementations require use of Microsoft Visual Studio, Workflow Foundation and SharePoint for building these applications. The development and management of such applications can be quite complex and take a lot of time.

Workflow-intensive enterprise applications are very complex in nature and require similar tools as applications with medium complexity. Then necessitate protracted implementation time lines and complex coding requirements.

Skelta BPM drastically brings down the time and costs for building workflows within the SharePoint environment.Even extremely complex workflows can be designed and deployed in a fraction of the time taken for developing similar functionality in MOSS. Besides, advanced BPM features in Skelta such as the Enterprise Console and BAM enableenterprises to rapidly roll out a powerful BPM platform.

Skelta BPM: The Best of Both Worlds

Skelta BPM seamlessly integrates with SharePoint. The user can configure the site where Skelta BPM needs to be used and can use it both inside SharePoint as well as can work from Skelta BPM Enterprise Console.

Fig. 2.0 Building Workflow Solutions in Skelta BPM

This diagram depicts how Skelta enhances Microsoft's workflow capabilities tools and effort required for the solution

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Key Features

Process Modelling

Skelta allows web 2.0 technology based process designer right inside SharePoint. This enables complete model driven process development inside SharePoint platform. Skelta's Process designer is a 100% web based Visio like tool. This can be used to create a simple to a very complex process all within a browser window without any client side installation. It is a complete drag and drop based environment, which allows the complete process to be modeled. Skelta follows industry standards like BPMN (Business Process modeling notations) notations for modeling which means models created inside SharePoint are easily interoperable and understood.

For those who are comfortable with Visio, Skelta also offers the capability of taking the Visio created models inside its own Process Designer.

The Process can be created, maintained and modified throughout the process life cycle using the Process modeler environment. Since both complex and simple processes can be created in this environment it offers a great platform for developers and knowledge workers to collaborate for highly complex applications. Since developers can enhance Skelta's capabilities by creating custom activities, these can then be exposed to knowledge workers when desired.

Human Workflow Capabilities

Skelta's modeling environment allows creation of very interactive human workflows right out-of-the box. Skelta provides comprehensive support for various human workflow requirements and supports more than 40 patterns of work allocation and performing tasks during the processes.Apart from assigning tasks directly to user, one can even assign them to groups or roles existing in SharePoint or elsewhere in Active Directory or some other custom user storage location. One can also create a rule to identified appropriate users during execution of the process for assigning of tasks.

Skelta's Process designer is 100% web based Visio like tool. This can be used to create simple to very complex process all within browser window without any client side installations.

Skelta follows industry standard BPMN (Business Process modeling notations) notations

Skelta provides comprehensive support for various human workflow requirements and supports more than 40 patterns of work allocation and performing tasks during the processes.

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Fig. 3.0 Process Designer

There are several ways in which users can act on tasks, they can work on them right inside SharePoint, or they can go to Microsoft Office program such as Microsoft Outlook and work on the tasks even when they are offline. Tasks can be completed even on Mobile devices such as Blackberry and Windows Mobile.

Mail Channel - Responding from Outlook client

Skelta provides comprehensive support for team based task allocation, where in there is whole team of people such as a helpdesk or a sales team etc working on the task and the manager needs to oversee the task allocation. Skelta also allows various levels of automation of allocation logic in such environments so that appropriate tasks get pushed to the task handling agent based on the business rules defined.

Apart from basic task assignment one can use the platform to assign dynamic escalations where not just tasks can be escalated to the appropriate manager but also some procedures can be automated such as assigning a task to someone else to honour a SLAs. One can use Business hours rather than just elapsed hours to define how SLAs work in case of specific tasks.

Skelta also allows various level of automation of allocation logic in such environments so that appropriate task is pushed to the task handling agent based on the business rules defined.

Apart from basic task assignments one can use the platform to assign dynamic escalations where in not just things can be escalated to appropriate manager

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Fig 4.0 Hierarchical Time bound Processes

Queue Management

Skelta provides queue management which allow you to group users identified as a common pool or grouped on role basis and allocate tasks to the group. Skelta queue management has following features

It supports Push-Pull patterns Role/ User can be specified as Participants Access rights for Role/ User can be defined Queue level escalations are possible Automated/ Manual Allocation of tasks to actors can be done

Task allocations can be done on the following basis:Automatic - allocation is done automatically using some algorithm. Assignment is done using

Round Robin, Random or Least Used methods. This is the push pattern, which is a default pattern.

Manual - task allocation is done manually. In this case, users can be allowed to view and pick a task from the queue. Alternatively, users are allowed to use a button in the Work Item List to get the next available task in queue. In this case, users cannot view the tasks in the queue but can click a button to get the next available task in the queue. This is the pull pattern as opposed to the push pattern where the queue assigns tasks.

Combination - task allocation is done using a combination of automatic and manual methods.

Skelta Workflow Wizard

Skelta BPM provides the functionality to consume SharePoint events and copy & delete items. The wizard also comes with a single and multi level approval template making it easy to implement.

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Business Analysis and Monitoring (BAM)

Skelta also has lot of Business Intelligence capability to determine productivity of people working on various tasks. This allows one to track the bottlenecks in processes, identify the star performers, and identify and improve on resources that are becoming real bottlenecks by proactively monitoring data around activities performed in the system.

Dashboard : Skelta BAM dashboard has two views -Workflow Status :This report gives details of workflows finished successfully ,workflows finished with errors and workflows in awaiting mode.Workflow Instance: This report gives details of workflows running concurrently.

Analyzer :Transaction : The transaction analysis report gives details of activity ,work item and transaction type.Execution : The execution analysis report gives details of execution status of workflows in terms of workflows being executed , awaited ,completed ,failed ,aborted.

KPI : An organization can define their own KPI and generate a report

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Skelta BAM also makes it possible to see the actual workflow execution in three views - analyst view ,process view andexecution view .

Integration Capabilities

Skelta provides deep integration with Microsoft BizTalk server. This allows it to do highly scalable, transactional integration with other systems existing in the enterprise.

Apart from this Skelta offers good web services capability, and can consume any web service straight out-of-the-box in Skelta's modeling environment. It allows rapid integration with services provided by an enterprise thus allowing the SOA infrastructure to be leveraged even by knowledge workers. Skelta also allows creation of custom activities allows more complex tasks to be taken up by developers and to provide them in a reusable fashion to people modeling the processes, thus promoting reusability and versatility.

.Adding Value to MOSS

Reusable Workflow: MOSS does not provide for reusable workflows. The workflows created inside SharePoint Designer are not reusable and bound to list.

The workflow created in Skelta BPM can be reused thus saving a lot of rework. For example when one has to create a multistep workflow and if different steps are already created as workflow in Skelta BPM the only work that remains then is to associate these workflows to create new ones. As the processes are dynamic they change and evolve with time. To recreate them can be a pain. Skelta helps not only to drive the process but also extends a helping hand in reinventing and innovating them with least effort.

Workflow Interfaces and Interactions: MOSS out-of-the-box uses InfoPath forms and provide rich features through Office. However if an organization is neither using Office nor are they planning to use then this becomes a limitation .The next option is to build the workflow through SharePoint Designer which uses ASP.NET forms for workflow building .The ability to host or customize ASP.NET forms is limited. The remaining option is the use of workflow .

The decision then boils down to build vs. buy. Skelta BPM allows developers to extend and customize the Skelta features. Custom Activities can be built using the API's, provided by Skelta.

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Integration with Databases : MOSS does not provide for integration with other databases. Substantial coding is required to build host processes to integrate with databases if the data is not stored in SharePoint.

Skelta BPM provides native integration with MS SQL as well as Oracle servers.

Integration with External Systems: MOSS does not provide any facility to interact with other enterprise system (ERP or CRM)either through SharePoint Designer or out-of-the-box workflow. Integration requires writing custom code in visual studio or look at ISVs to provide extensive workflow solutions.

Skelta BPM comes with native integration with ERP systems like SAP.

Complex Business Logic : The out-of-the-box workflows in MOSS do not provide functionality to add any type of business logic ,converging or branching within the workflow. Such logic requires the use of SharePoint Designer or VisualStudio to add business logic.

Skelta BPM provides for out-of-the-box functionality for different categories of processes viz. human activities, integration activities ,scheduler activities, engine activities, communication activities, SharePoint activities and custom activities. For example when one has to create a multi-step workflow and if different steps are already created as workflow in Skelta BPM then all that is required is to associate these workflows to create new ones.

Escalations inside Workflow: Escalations in MOSS is limited to sending email reminders at a given point in time. MOSS does not provide for advanced escalations such as automatically redirecting the workflow to a different user or group of users, or taking some kind of custom action.

Skelta BPM provides advanced escalations redirecting the workflow to a different user or group of users ,or taking some kind of custom action.

Queue Management In workflow : The tasks inside a process workflow need to be managed in different queues when there are many events and limited resources. One example of this is global helpdesk operation of an organization where customer complaints are to be routed region wise and then taken care of MOSS does not provide for queue management inside a workflow.

Skelta BPM provides for queue management which allows grouping of similar resources into queue and dispatch of tasks using various algorithms.

Auditing and Reporting: MOSS provides for simple reports on process status & participants. Advanced reports are not provide even with SharePoint Designer.

Skelta BPM offers advanced BAM capabilities including Trend Analysis, Resource Performance. BAM allows business users to configure Key Performance Indicators [KPIs] to generate business data related reports.

Workflows are Site Bound: MOSS does not provide workflow actions that can cross site, application, and portal boundaries .This can be done through visual studio only.

Skelta BPM provides for workflow actions which are not site bound and can cross site, application, and portal boundaries.

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MOSS out-of-the-box Workflow: MOSS out-of-the-box workflow is site bound, so actions such as creating task or copying documents cannot take place outside the site that it is running on. These workflows cannot be extended or modified since they are compiled DLLS on the SharePoint server.

Skelta BPM workflows are not site bound and can be extended to any site .The work flows are also modifiable and thus provide easy customization as per needs of an organization.

Hierarchical Time bound Processes: Processes in an organization need to be independent of people. Work needs to continue irrespective of the presence intermediate people at nodal. Skelta BPM effectively addresses such scenarios effectively through functionality for alternate resources, escalations and time-stamping processes.

Ease Of use: The business users find it difficult to use both SharePoint designer as well as visual studio. Both these do not provide drag and drop type of ready made process icon facility. This makes the process tedious and time consuming.

Skelta BPM has ready made type process icon which can be dragged and dropped. They can be interconnected simply by dragging the icons the user wants and saves time.

Making the Workflow concept successful: The basic goal of any organization is to employ IT solutions to improve processes and increase productivity. Going back to basics of BPM, the aim is to free business users from the shackles of IT. But the shackles are back with business users designing the process in SharePoint designer or visual studio. Ultimately the user loses interest and become if not unproductive definitely unde rproductive. Skelta adheres to these very basics of BPM and productivity, providing ready made process icons which only need to be dragged and dropped to create a new process. People make an organization and we make work interesting for people getting the obvious end result of improved process and productivity.

Invensys Skelta, Salarpuria Touchstone, Sarjapur Outer Ring Road, Bangalore 560 087, India Tel: +91 (80) 4060 2600Email: sales@skelta.com, Web: www.skelta.com

2014 Invensys Skelta. All rights reserved. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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