The Process Professional: An Independent Review of Ascentn’s AgilePoint

In a continuing series evaluating the tools used by Business Process practioners, this article looks at Ascentn’s AgilePoint. Criteria for evaluation are ease of use, a short learning curve, and good collaboration features.

AgilePoint is a full-featured BPM suite. Ascentn distinguishes their market as one of “people and culture, not technology.” After looking into their products, I understand this to mean their focus is on the process practitioner.

Ease of Use
AgilePoint is a .NET-based BPMS built to integrate with the full Microsoft suite of applications. The suite puts the control for process modeling, execution, and modification squarely in the hands of the user.

AgilePoint comes out of the box with over 100 pre-built process-enabled services. No IT involvement is required for over half of these services, allowing the user to invoke them without assistance. Others may require assistance from IT to configure, or to provide information needed to connect to existing services, databases, rules engines, etc. Examples of these include managing users from an existing Active Directory or manipulating records in an existing database. Additional modules can be custom built using AgilePoint Developer in supported .NET languages in Visual Studio.

AgilePoint then exposes these components to process creators in a familiar Visio drag-and-drop UI. This allows the creation of complex system attributes that are ready to execute or modify in run-time. As a long-time user of Visio to model process, I love this interface.

Short Learning Curve
Users familiar with Microsoft can learn to deploy and modify workflow, reporting, and process analysis quickly. One of the strengths of AgilePoint is that it leverages the Microsoft suite of products such as SharePoint for workflow and collaboration, Exchange to handle messaging and alerts that Outlook delivers, and existing Active Directory or LDAP for access control, assignments, and presence indication. Users choose InfoPath, AgileForms or ASP.NET to create forms while designing processes.

Collaboration Friendly
It is safe to say that most process professionals are familiar with Visio for process models, and the program is widely available throughout the enterprise. AgilePoint allows a department or division to use this familiar tool to build executable process and collaborate.

Once IT builds and exposes any process components that require their involvement, knowledge workers that are most familiar with the process create and make changes to the executable model directly. When changes are made using the AgilePoint Visio template add-in, the next instance of the process includes the change. The only time additional programming is required is when IT changes the asset itself, or when users need a new asset added to the current services.

HowTo
Using AgilePoint’s Envision, process modelers select actions – manual steps or system interactions – from Visio shape templates that users add to their desktop Visio program. A process is designed using the familiar drag-and-drop technique usually used to design a process. Users define decision criteria, business rules, approval workflow, exception paths, and conditional branches for each step using dialogue boxes or reusable business rules stored from previous definitions. Alerts, forms, queries, and other interaction between humans or systems are defined within this visualization step. When this is completed, the visualized process is execution ready.

Features
Some of the key features of the AgilePoint suite –

• Exclusively model-driven, allowing preservation of the model throughout the process life cycle – including run-time modifications;
• An open and extensible web service API can be invoked from any language or framework;
• Assets and process steps can be combined into reusable modules that can be used throughout the enterprise;
• Seamless integration with MOSS, InfoPath, LDAP and Active Directory make features of these applications immediately available to users.
• Users add Visio shape templates to existing installations of Visio to expose IT assets and services to process designers and users.
• On the fly reporting is as easy as choosing fields and designing the look of the report – any user can be set up with this ability.

The Specs
The suite includes the following components

• AgilePoint Server
• AgilePoint Clustering Server Manager (used only in a clustered server environment)
• AgilePoint Enterprise Manager
• AgilePoint Envision
• AgilePoint Developer
• AgilePoint SharePoint Integration
• AgilePoint InfoPath Integration
• AgilePoint Office Client Integration
• AgileForms

Operating system requirements vary for each server, and differ by topology, but the underlying OS is Microsoft-based for each of them.

My Take
Ascentn seems to get the often challenging relationship between the business and IT, and provides a solution to enhance communication for both organizations. I’m excited about the user interface and reporting capabilities, and appreciate that someone is effectively leveraging the most common suite of applications in the enterprise by integrating with a variety of Microsoft products. The gurus seem to agree - Forrester rated them as a Strong Performer in its Human Centric BPMS for .NET 2008, and Gartner’s 2008 and 2009 Magic Quadrant saw them as “visionary.”

Karen Tricomi is a self-proclaimed process geek, who began learning about business process management before there was an acronym. She has consulted internationally on technology, quality, and change, and is currently employed in the Enterprise Methods and Process organization of a multi-national financial services institution.

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