Tim Bauer’s Running Thoughts

When you gaze at Sharepoint as of right now … which horse do you see? Secretariat or the Trojan Horse? I guess it depends what side of the walls of Troy you sit on … but lets ponder a bit anyway.

(** I skipped BI above on purpose as the BDC, to me is the primary unique value statement there **)

In short, I think the core of Sharepoint is about team collaboration and in reality there are better cheaper answers in the market. Study what true collaboration enablement is in your ORG then jump for the shiny widget (which may be MSFT … but may not).

What do you think?

** START OF RAW SCRIBBLE TAKEN WHILE RUNNING **

– No running notes today … spent too much time typing off this article (have to move on the inspiration)

** END RAW SCRIBBLE TAKEN WHILE RUNNING **

Salesforce.com seems to have a rather user friendly solution peculating in their stack. Granted, I am 14 months late to the party (originally posted around 10/2006) but whats new there.

Wielding Workflow - Presentation from Dreamforce 06
Rajaram (ProjMgr on Apex)

The presentation (43m in duration) was a poorly done for the video medium so DONT watch it. You can get a better investment from your time by reading my raw notes below and/or studying the slides (at the link above). That said here were the notables.

1. Configuration Over Coding. They do this very well. You can see an example of the 5 UI steps to setup the approval flow they demonstrated. Not as strong as the visual solutions (read Sharepoint, BPMS vendors) that are emerging in the marketplace … but sometimes simpler drives better adoption as well as more refined processes. However, I believe (need to test out) that you can then extend that base set of tools w/ APEX code.
2. API or UI .. You Choose. So you can move approval processes stage to stage via systemic or manual intervention. In short, the SFDC API has full compatibility with the approval engine (or so they say).

I may try out their tools to see if it is good as it looks. Here is the flow / UI setup screen shot I mentioned above:

*** RAW NOTES ***
–Approvals Engine is new big thing
–3:00 — Still talking over BPM general concepts
–[no slides, that sucks]
–Key worklflows new - field updates, outbound messages, outbound delivery status, approval processes, approval routing
–Old ones - rules, tasks, alerts, addresses
–approval hierachary
–Field update - Field triggers basically
–~15:00 in
–Outbound message - XML packet to an endpoint
–[increased # of rules, advanced OR features, new filter options]
–[rules have a variety of field values that can pulled]
–Approval Demo - PTO Request
–global characteristics — if valid enter approval process (ie employees of this type)
–who send approval to … user object has field of hierarchy … drives approval hierarchy … not the role hiearchy … field called manager on user object … use value in mgr as person receiving approval request. who can edit approval while in process?
–all approvals have a single approval formal .. per process … four step will get same look and feel … you can define by process
–what displayed to mgr on send?
–wonder if these approval flows trigger on API update of a table]
–global rules, template, editability, flow …
–multi step w/ filters per step … so always send to a mgr … send to 2nd level if above X amount
–admin set when approver can delegate
–can control rejects at any step …
–25:00 still hitting this
–create start date on a saturday (for the rule to start)
–Approver logs in and sees ‘items to approve’ box
–30:00 still going on example of approval
–slide 20 in thier PPT is a good overview of SFDC rules engine
–partner discussion
–used for credit verification (aboveall software partner talks)
–scenario don’t sell to non credit worthy (revenue recognition issues)
–they use d&b, daysoutstanding from fin invoicing application (SAP), forecasted
opportunities (increase risk)
–35:00 - still going
–they use outbound message to SAP to lock customer
–40:00 - End of the Example of thier app
–41:00 - Q&A
–Any obj in approval process you can see as user / admin
–Via API you can view steps (who approved, when, why)
–New ‘verb’ of ‘proccess’ … can approve, reassign, reject a work item via remote system
–API - submit ID, next approver, comments, process request - work item id, action (remove, approve, reject) … get back ID process, ID of new work items, current status, PRM product uses this ..in short all things in UI can be done in API
–existing approval object on contract remains … or you can use this engine

Watched this webcast from 10/04 from on Shared Services and how they imply the need for BPM infrastructure.

http://www.fsw.fujitsu.com

Interesting to see how the industry seems to be talking more about BPM now (buzz word ebb and flow?).

The keys I got from the presentation however were:

1. Shared Services Is A BPM Driver. Whether they are still talking about it or not the drive for organizations to identify areas of thier business that should and can be centralized continues. BPM enables that centralization to occur with better accountability and visibility to the metrics that the people in the field were managing in the past (as they had the authority to change).
2. Where is the shiny packaging? Interesting that after the analyst finished speaking they shifted to an overview of Fujitsu’s Interstage product. I was amused that it looked a little dated (functional no doubt, but dated). Probably the UI. Will be interesting to see if customers go for a proven product like Interstage (top in Gartners BPM quadrent in vision) or a shiny new one like BizTalk.
3. Ties to BPM Methodologies (like Kaname).  One push we have seen in clients is shared services but at the webservice (not process) level. I think BPM can play a role here. Primarily monitoring system-to-system performance but in some cases a webservice shared at the enterprise level may have human-to-human steps.

Raw notes below:

Quote:
Leland Forst - Amherst Group
………….○ 3 drivers
……………………..§ Cost Focus (shared service less)
……………………..§ Businesses don’t specialize in shared services
……………………..§ Organizations underestimate cost of legacy ops versus shared services
……………………..§ Financial Services … Re-assessing what could be ’shared’ across divisions
……………………..§ MFG wants to flex variable and admin costs with global model
……………………..§ Government … reduced public spend
………….○ Key
……………………..§ Shared Service must run like a business
………….○ Areas
……………………..§ Classical — HR, Fin, Training, facilities, IT, Legal, General Admin
……………………..§ Services — product, processing, operations, logistics, marketing, sales, customer care. Content/ops/sales are coming under focus
……………………..§ Industry — Engineering R&D, Procurement, MFG, etc
………….○ 7:00 — Models
……………………..§ Offshore / Onshore
……………………..§ InHouse / Outsourced
……………………..§ Focus on inhouse (low impact, high control)
………….○ 9:00 — Long Term Impact
……………………..§ Low - Cost Reduction (centralize, safe, scale, cost variance down)
……………………..§ Medium - Value Creation (quality, productivity, satisfaction, reduced time to market)
……………………..§ High - Competitive Difference (redefine, flex, collaborative, enhanced resource sharing)
………….○ 11:45 — Why Shared Services
……………………..§ Cost savings (reduce duplication)
……………………..§ Increase consistent quality, expertise, focus on core business
……………………..§ Pool budgets and scarce resources (less resources required)
……………………..§ Ability to Scale (flexibility, risk mitigate, innovation)
………….○ 14:00 - Drivers
……………………..§ Cost (highest driver)
……………………..§ Quality (tied for 2nd … audit processes needed)
……………………..§ Expertise (loss of flexibility is risk — focus on few expertise areas)
……………………..§ Core business improve (tied for 2nd .. lowest driver, loss of IP?)
……………………..§ Flexibility (tied for 2nd … continuing changes in organizations)
……………………..§ Risk Mitigation ()
• 17:00 — Harry Dent (Fujitsu - Interstage)
………….○ HOW to enable shared services from IT
………….○ Talk of services that are shared across applications (SOA, webservices)
………….○ Interstage Products
……………………..§ Portal
……………………..§ BPM
……………………..§ Integration Manager
……………………..§ Content Integration
……………………..§ BI
……………………..§ Supporting tools - XML Search, XBRL Processor
………….○ 21:30 - BPM Interstage - How help shared services
……………………..§ Process Automation
……………………..§ Process Visibility
……………………..§ Process Accountability
……………………..§ Complete Process Life-Cycle
……………………..§ Key features
…………………………………□ Drag/drop / collaborative
…………………………………□ Non-technical for process & rule formation
…………………………………□ Integration
…………………………………□ Monitoring engine
…………………………………□ Optimize wizard
………….○ 23:30 - Interstage Portal
……………………..§ Unified access to business information
……………………..§ Delivery Shared Applicatiosn
………….○ 24:30 - Interstage Content Integrator
……………………..§ Information aggregator
……………………..§ Format transform
………….○ 25:00 - Demo
……………………..§ Features 3 products above
……………………..§ Processes — legal, help desk, payroll, HR
……………………..§ Gary Schroeder - Snr Consultant @ FC
…………………………………□ Process visibility by role
…………………………………□ Help desk process (show incident form and supporting workflow)
…………………………………………….® Show some charting on the process (response time, close time)
…………………………………□ Show legal SLA document and associated workflow
…………………………………………….® Show integration in workflow to ERP data to assist in decisions around document step
…………………………………□ Show employee requesting a service (in this case onboarding)
…………………………………□ Show visio triggers off onboarding (multiple parallel paths).
…………………………………………….® Show how the process can then tie one request information to many submission (making it transparent to the user)
………….○ 36:30 - Summary

Watched this webcast on http://www.ebizq.net.

http://www.ebizq.net/webinars/archive.html

You have to signup but its free. Not a bad looking site for EAI/BPM/SOA research. I bookmarked it.

Anyway, I checked this out in light of ongoing conversations w/ clients around various aspects of EAI/SOA/etc. Wanted to hear what a $3.5B company had to say about it. The guy was very well spoken but drew long in the tooth towards the end. Still excellent detail discussion of how they setup thier infrastructure and why. Here are the keys I heard:

1. No Bus (ESB) for them (not big enough). It was interesting that they choose not to leverage an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) to start with. They felt that thier number of services (~100) didn’t warrant it.
2. WWW –> DMZ –> FORK. Thier infra design basically boiled down to four enviroments: WWW, DMZ (app UI’s live here), PARTNER (business logic layer lives here), INTERNAL (web services live here). Prior to an SOA plan they would route service calls serially through the environments. With SOA (via an XML Gateway between the DMZ and INTERNAL) they simplified accesss and increased security. Interesting that it bypassed some of the business logic layer in the PARTNER area (I assume they redeployed that.
3. Try again SAP They are an SAP shop (as alot of our customers are) but don’t feel that SAP’s SOA toolkit was ready to be the core of thier solution. This is interesting in that alot of our SAP customers (RA, HD, Miller, JJ Keller, etc) are looking for ways to expose SAP services out to thier org … and here is one unbaised team deciding no way (rolling thier own).

A good webcast. Two thumbs up. Detail notes below.

Watched this deeper dive today

MSDN Webcast: Developing Rules Driven Workflows (Part 7 of 7) (Level 300)

Same reasons as yesterday (pipeline from clients is very rules focused). Key snippets I got today was:

1. Better Detail. Got more detail on key aspects of rules. In short yesterdays last 20 minutes was covered in 60 minutes.

2. WWF vs BizTalk. They outlined thier view of how WWF plays versus BizTalk in the next release. In short it made me think that in the next release of BizTalk (2008?) they will be more of a premium version of WWF. Might imply that short term tactics with clients should leverage WWF for core and BizTalk only for the tooling / BA support.

3. Better review of editor.I took a snap shot of thier free editor and they covered it a bit more (about a minute). In that time it was clear to me that we should plan on building out on the editor if exposing to the business side. Still very technical in some ways … but not bad for free.

My detail notes are below.