Microsoft Targets Workflow Apps
New engine supports enterprise applications by managing documents throughout Office.Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service
LOS ANGELES-- Microsoft has unveiled a new workflow engine to manage business processes and integrate operations across many of its software products, including Windows and Office.
The tool, Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF), gives business users using Windows better control of how business processes behave across various applications, said Eric Rudder, senior vice president for servers and tools, who unveiled the product during his keynote Wednesday morning Professional Developers Conference here.
Usurping Third Parties
The engine addresses not only system workflow but also human workflow, Rudder said. It joins Windows Presentation Server and Windows Communications Foundation as a core developer subsystem underlying Windows Vista.
Vista is the next version of Windows, and is expected to ship by the end of 2006. Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly code-named Avalon) is the graphics engine and Windows Communication Foundation (formerly Indigo) is the communications subsystem.
A mob of companies currently offer software for business process management and integration. While enterprise customers used to buy the software as a standalone product, now they increasingly are purchasing it as part of a suite of Web development infrastructure software offered by companies such as IBM, BEA Systems, and Oracle.
Taking its usual competitive tack, Microsoft is including WWF across the major applications of its Windows platform, so developers building applications on Windows at some point no longer will need to use third-party software to provide business process integration and management.
Using WWF, developers can visually design business processes that can trigger automated tasks and events that employees perform every day throughout various applications on the Windows platform. The engine also will be a core part of products in the Microsoft Office family, such as SharePoint Portal Server, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange Server, so business processes in those products can be integrated across the system.
Tracking Docs Across Apps
In Wednesday's second morning keynote, Microsoft Office Senior Vice President Steven Sinofsky detailed Microsoft's vision for managing enterprise content through offerings within the Office family, though the company is not ready to disclose the exact packaging of those applications yet.
In an interview following the keynote, Kirk Koenigsbauer, a general manager in Microsoft's Information Worker group, said that Microsoft's vision for enterprise content management means tracking a document, no matter what its file format, through every aspect of its life cycle in an enterprise. He acknowledged this will be a huge task that Microsoft is still figuring out exactly how to tackle, as the company in the past merely "dipped its toe" into this market.
"For enterprise content management we're looking at the whole life cycle of that document," Koenigsbauer said. "We are building technology to facilitate that entire process--the entire life cycle of a random piece of content [in an enterprise]."
To enable this kind of comprehensive document tracking, technologies such as WWF and the new user-friendly interface that will be available in the next version of Office, code-named Office 12, are essential, he said. Office 12 is scheduled to ship by the end of the year, and its first beta is expected to be available in the next several weeks.
"One of the reasons why enterprise content management is so hard is it's not integrated with how people work," Koenigsbauer said. "We think we can really create an experience thata??s rich for the customer in a way that's easy and natural to use."