Microsoft Gold Certified Partner

The Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Program provides a way for organizations to identify companies that have proven their commitment and expertise in one or more specialized areas when delivering Microsoft technologies. Microsoft Certified Partners need to pass a tough set of criteria, including enhanced certification and a portfolio of real-world customer references, and are thus identified as the most skilled partners in specific solution areas.

Metastorm has been a member of the Microsoft Partner Program at the highest possible level since 2003. It has achieved Gold Partnership status in the Independent Software (ISV) Category and Metastorm’s is one of the few BPM software solutions that has achieved Certified for Windows Server 2003 status – giving you added confidence in the quality and performance of your mission-critical BPM system.

Close co-operation with Microsoft has enabled us to take advantage of the latest Microsoft technologies to deliver innovative solutions to our customers. Recent projects have a resulted in Metastorm Client for Office 2007 application that takes advantage of Ribbon tabs and support for Workflow Foundation within the Metastorm BPM suite.

Integration with Microsoft Office Products

Metastorm BPM takes full advantage of the Microsoft Office 2007 suite of products.

A suite of configurable web parts allows organizations to take advantage of the Enterprise Portal capabilities of SharePoint to allow users to access Metastorm BPM information through a SharePoint Portal interface. Users are able to access their work lists, monitor the health of their processes, administer processes, view dashboards and initiate new items into processes through SharePoint.

For document intensive processes, Metastorm BPM can leverage SharePoint’s Enterprise Content Management assets for better knowledge sharing, improved customer communications, and increased process efficiency.

Additional integration between Metastorm BPM processes and SharePoint can be provided by taking advantage of Metastorm BPM’s support for Workflow Foundation.

Following a joint proof of concept with Microsoft, Metastorm have delivered a fully functional BPM client within Microsoft Office 2007. Metastorm BPM Client for Office enables full participation in Metastorm BPM processes through the 2007 Microsoft Office system. Users access the power of Metastorm BPM directly through Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. The client takes advantage of advanced Office 2007 system features such as Ribbon tabs, task panes, galleries, ScreenTips and Smart Tags to provide full access to Metastorm BPM.

Additionally users of Word 2007 and Excel 2007 can take advantage of Metastorm’s innovative “Process Binding”. Any Word 2007 document or Excel 2007 spreadsheet may be bound to a Metastorm BPM work item with data from the process linked to fields in the document or cells in the spreadsheet. Once bound, a document can be sent to another user who can take actions on the folder from within the Office application by selecting a Metastorm BPM action from the Action button on the Ribbon tab.

Users of Excel 2007 can access Metastorm BPM data to generate reports, charts and dashboards based on data from the Metastorm BPM process. Metastorm’s use of SmartTags allows the development of “Actionable” dashboards where users can drill down from the dashboard into underlying BPM data. This is of exceptional value to business users who wish to generate their own reports and charts based on both the process data and the line of business data collected by the Metastorm process engine.

Office Business Applications

Metastorm have delivered Office Business Applications (OBA) that takes advantage of the Metastorm BPM product and Microsoft Office technologies. These include a Client Matter Intake solution for the Legal industry and a New Account On-Boarding solution for the Financial Services Industry. Full details can be found at OBA Central.

Microsoft SQL Server

Metastorm BPM uses Microsoft SQL Server as its repository database and many customers opt to take advantage of SQL Reporting Services to deliver process intelligence from the information collected about the process automatically by the Metastorm Process Engine.

Integration with Microsoft BizTalk

Metastorm BPM Advanced Rules and Metastorm BPM Advanced Integration use Microsoft BizTalk Server and offers tight integration between Metastorm BPM and Microsoft BizTalk Server.

Metastorm BPM Advanced Integration provides rapid and easy integration between a Metastorm BPM application and other applications via Microsoft BizTalk server.

Metastorm recognizes that some processes require complex business rules that are most effective if built, maintained and executed in specialized Business Rules Engines (BRE). Taking advantage of a specialized BRE allows process efficiency to be improved through improved processing speed, the elimination of manual intervention at some stages in a process, and ultimately the elimination of some stages altogether. Metastorm Advanced Rules invokes business rules hosted in Microsoft BizTalk Server. It provides tight integration between the Metastorm Designer and BizTalk and the Metastorm Process Engine and BizTalk.

Integration with Workflow Foundation

Integration with Workflow Foundation allows workflows to be designed that take advantage of Metastorm BPM process context and data. Those workflows can be executed as part of a BPM process under the auspices of the Metastorm Process Engine. Developers can also take advantage of the business rules capabilities of Workflow Foundation and invoke them as part of a Metastorm BPM business process.

Integration with Visual Studio

The Metastorm Process Orchestrator for .NET provides a range of capabilities to allow developers using Visual Studio to optimally use their skills to assist Business Analysts in building processes.

• Metastorm Process Events for Visual Studio is a way of separating process design from process events. It allows developers to create process event handlers using C# that respond to Metastorm BPM process events running on the process engine. This capability allows customers with Visual Studio expertise to create applications that participate in business processes by plugging in to selected process events.
• The suite of ASP .NET controls allows developers to easily built their own client interface for a Metastorm BPM system or embed Metastorm user services into an existing ASP .NET interface.
• The Enterprise Class Library (ECL) for .NET is ideally suited for organizations whose developers' skill set are based on the Microsoft .NET framework. The ECL object model provides complete access to Metastorm BPM and will typically be used when building applications that interact with a Metastorm Process Engine.
• The .NET Activator generates a BPM function that can be used by a Business Analysts from a .NET assembly built by a developer. This enables developers to build integrations to other systems in Visual Studio yet make them available for analysts who build processes.