We’re all about making things easier here at Active Endpoints. And with our new product, Cloud Extend for Salesforce.com, PCWorld’s Chris Kanaracus agrees.

Cloud Extend for Salesforce.com gives sales managers and other domain experts the ability to deliver to their users knowledge and interactive guides in an effective manner, without involving developers.

We appreciate Chris’s mention and recommend reading his article to see how we are helping customers get the most out of their on demand CRM and what the future holds for Cloud Extend for Salesforce.com.

In previous episodes, Michael Rowley explained how Socrates simplifies the design of screenflows through the innovative concept of guidance trees. In this episode, Michael demonstrated how Socrates also simplifies how the data is used. We saw how Socrates screenflows could call automated steps, but unlike technologies that have come before, did not require the designer to map input and output parameters to variables. This unique approach allowed the domain expert to focus on creating the guidance tree logic and delegated the complexity of data mapping to the developer instead.

In this episode of CTO Tuesdays, Michael Rowley debated how guidance trees offered a new paradigm for creating guided applications. He discussed what could be done with a guidance tree and explained how the metaphor simplified the design process over other approaches such as workflow and process modeling. Michael also demonstrated how the new paradigm could be leveraged in a powerful yet elegant manner to simplify the creation and manipulation of these trees. We ended the session with a very lively Q&A with the audience offering lots of comments, questions and viewpoints.

In episode 50 of CTO Tuesday Michael Rowley introduced Socrates, a new technology for creating Screenflows and demonstrated the guidance trees used to create them. In this episode, Michael postulated whether screenflows really are “business processes”. It’s not surprising to discover that the answer is more complicated than a simple yes or no. During the talk, Michael spent time diving into Socrates and how screenflows could be integrated with what would be unhesitatingly called a business processes.

In KMWorld’s recent post about our new screenflow product, Socrates, we here at Active Endpoints couldn’t agree more on two points. One, is that Socrates “shows great potential” since it empowers domain experts to design and deploy screenflow applications in just minutes, without any training or technical skills. Well, of course we agree there. Two, Socrates did go on trial for challenging the norm, which is just what we are trying to accomplish with Socrates. Why not give these expert, but usually non-technical, folks an intuitive way to easily and quickly automate their core processes to make their teams more productive? The uses cases are endless. Things like refund processes, sales promotions, ticketing, resolving Internet and cell phone outages. It’s wherever you have a question-answer workflow where your users are led to specific outcomes. Socrates uses the standards-based execution engine in our BPMS, ActiveVOS, so all the code is happening but there is no need for these domain experts to know it, or even know that it exists.

We have not seen anything quite like this before and are sure you have not, either. Take a look and let us know what you think – sign up for the Socrates Instant Trial. You’ll be designing screenflows faster than being able to digest any Greek philosohers’ texts, even the abridged versions!

CTO Tuesdays reached a significant milestone this week with its 50th episode. So to commemorate this occasion Michael Rowley unveiled a brand new product called Socrates. This innovative product was designed to enable business users and domain experts to build simple, yet powerful web applications that guide to successful outcomes. These applications can be used for troubleshooting, diagnostics, up sell promotions or refund processes. In fact Socrates is useful for any customer service situation that requires a user to ask questions and receive answers in order to reach a good resolution. So sit back and watch how Michael effortlessly puts the product through its paces during its world premiere.

I am very pleased to announce the release of an exciting new product from Active Endpoints named Socrates. It is an extremely simple web-based design environment for creating screenflows, which walk a user through instructions and questions, guiding them to do the right thing at the right time.

Socrates was first conceived during our work with a large telecommunications customer that needed a better way to guide their call center staff as they handled calls from their customers. Their agents had previously been working with a dashboard-style application that allowed them to run any tests or ask any question from the user in order to resolve the user’s problem. This was OK for their most experienced agents, but most of their agents were at a loss – inefficiently muddling through based on what they could remember from their training. The result was that too many cases had to be escalated to the next tier of service, which is both more expensive for the company as well as requiring more time from the customer.

Socrates guides the user through screens, prompting him or her with questions that should be asked, and having the answers to those question lead to appropriate system tests or new questions. The key requirement though, is that it has to be possible for a subject matter expert (i.e. domain expert) to be able to create or modify the screenflow that is shown to their agents. The tree of possible questions and tests is very large and they are always thinking of new questions or approaches to solving customer problems. If IT has to get involved in order to make any change, then making the change may be such a pain that people wouldn’t bother and it wouldn’t get updated.

Getting a screenflow design environment to really be simple enough for a domain expert to use without any help from IT is hard to do right. Most products that attempt this kind of thing try to do too much. They try to be complete workflow or business process modeling and execution environments. In my experience, once you get to that level of power and flexibility, then no matter how simple any given feature is, the full combination of features and capabilities becomes too much for most people to understand and work with.

We’ve created our design environment to be specialized to this kind of use case. That allowed us to think out of the box for a new kind of design paradigm that matched the use case – and we found a great one. It is called a guidance tree and it is a true technological leap forward in providing a simple but powerful design environment.

You can read more about guidance trees and their use by Socrates by reading my white paper, which describes the main tenets behind its design. Or, you can skip all the arguments for why it is easier and see for yourself. Take a drive of the technology in our demo environment. It is pre-populated with a few interesting guidance trees, which you can try modifying or you can create new ones. There are two primary restrictions in the demo environment, which wouldn’t be true with the full product: 1) you can’t create your own custom automated steps; and 2) no one sees your guidance trees except you.

So what are you waiting for? Give it a try.

Today, Active Endpoints announced the availability of Socrates. Socrates dramatically changes the way IT and domain experts collaborate to create prescriptive applications quickly and easily. The power of Socrates is that it allows a domain expert to design and deploy a screenflow‐based application in minutes, with no training or technical skills. Screenflow‐based applications include both question oriented workflows and automated services required to complete a task for a specific job function in the most productive manner possible. The innovation within the underlying technology of Socrates is that it provides a real and tangible breakthrough in ease of use, and is so unique it has a patent pending.



What should be on your application development wish list? Find out by watching this webinar replay where guest speaker Mike Gualtieri, Senior Analyst with Forrester Research Inc., and Dr. Michael Rowley, CTO of Active Endpoints, explore how to dramatically increase development productivity and create better process applications by focusing on design. Mike covers the three items on the wish list:

1.      Dramatically increase development productivity

2.      Designed to help developers achieve seven qualities of great software

3.      Empower “business developers”

Mike also explains why a combination of tools and platforms is necessary when it comes to building some applications and advises how to fill your toolbox wisely. Michael presents how the ActiveVOS process automation platform easily enables IT project teams to design and deploy business process applications rapidly, dramatically increasing productivity.

Approvals are one of the most common tasks performed by people in every organization and can range from a simple single person, sequential approval, to a complex parallel group voting process. The WS-HumanTask specification doesn’t explicitly describe how different types of approval patterns can be implemented. In this episode Michael explained how these different types of approval patterns can be supported. Michael also demonstrated how to use the ActiveVOS designer, the WS-HumanTask activity and the ActiveVOS Central task list system to show you how it’s done!

The WS-HumanTask standard doesn’t explicitly talk about how people can work together on a task or how someone can delegate another person to temporarily work on all of their tasks. However, these situations were considered during the development of WS-HumanTask specification and there are features in the standard that were designed to support them. In this week’s episode, Michael Rowley described how collaboration and delegation can be supported using the WS-HumanTask standard and demonstrated how it works using the ActiveVOS Central task list system.

One of our customers, itfc, offers a variety of content and media management services for major studios and companies in entertainment and media, including NBC Universal and Virgin Media TV. itfc manages literally thousands and thousands of hours of work for these media giants. In a recent post on TVTechnology, Dave Harris, Director of Engineering and Technology, shared how ActiveVOS seamlessly integrates workflows across itfc customers’ many different, and previously incompatible, broadcast systems, empowering them to easily initiate these workflows on their own.

In this week’s episode, Michael covered one of the most widely requested topics of the CTO Tuesdays series and discussed how to use compensating transactions for long-running business processes. In addition to comparing and contrasting transaction managers with BPMS’s, he also showed how to use compensating processes to undo work when things invariably go wrong. As always the episode ended with a lively Q&A session with great participation from the audience.

If you’re not sure which companies to watch in 2011, look no further. Independent IT analysts and IT department heads at cio.uk.com have submitted their expert picks. Active Endpoints is delighted to to be included in their list of 20 IT stars of the year.

Why Active Endpoints? Our process automation platform, ActiveVOS, makes it easy and affordable for developers, architects and IT project managers to develop, deploy and manage core business processes. Clearly, the market is actively engaging in this shift away from using expensive, packaged SOA and BPM applications.

2011 is shaping up to be a great year.

The details are in the press release attached to this post.

An important aspect of business processes is who is allowed to start them. Not everyone is allowed to initiate every kind of process, and it is not just a matter of presentation. If you aren’t allowed to start a process, there should be no way of going around the UI in order to kick it off anyway. Proper authorization should be guaranteed at runtime. In this week’s episode, Michael Rowley discusses different strategies for process authorization. He describes standard authorization features that support simple authorization tests as well as architectural patterns that can be used to support more complex authorization scenarios.