Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on a whitepaper which SolidSoft has published today on our web site. It’s been published to coincide with the Microsoft Architect Insight conference at Newport which started today. SolidSoft is one of the event sponsors, and I spent the morning delivering a workshop looking, from an architectural perspective, on the use of rules engines in business process management. It seems to me that while there is lots of guidance and information on rules processing in BPM for business stakeholders, and some for business and enterprise architects, there is far less material orientated towards solution architects. I’ve attempted to push the boat out a little in the whitepaper by identifying some common patterns drawn from the work we’ve done around BizTalk Server and other technologies in the last few years. I hope it will provide some food for thought for solution architects who are considering the use of rules processing in relation to business processes. We are a Microsoft shop, and the patterns are illustrated using Microsoft’s process automation and workflow toolset, but I have tried to define the patterns in a reasonably agnostic fashion so that they have a wider appeal.
The whitepaper can be downloaded from http://www.solidsoft.com/WhitePaperDownload/DownloadFile.aspx?file=WP Rules Processing and BPM.pdf. You have to register with our site to access the paper, but if you do, you can also download a series of whitepapers by my colleague Simon Holloway on RFID. Simon worked for Microsoft as one of their RFID consultants until recently, and is a recognised authority on the subject.
Previously posted at http://blog.solidsoft.com/blogs/charles_young_mvp_biztalk/default.aspx