Wow, I could have had a V8!
Okay, now that that’s out of my system, Chris Adams (VP Product Management) was up to give us an overview of the V8 release which will be an intro to the deep dive session that’s coming up next. V8 isn’t brand new — 8.0 was in October 2007, 8.1 in July 2008, 8.2 is coming in December — but most of their customers haven’t yet moved to it yet.
Key differences:
- Moved from the Tidestone spreadsheet data model to XML
- Providing reusable connectors in a repository for linking to other systems rather than having to retrain Flobots
- ActiveX controls changed to .Net
- Changed event conditions to their rules engine
- Attachments do not need to be kept on the BPM server, but can be stored in SharePoint
- Native use of ActiveDirectory rather than having to build an org chart first
As a Microsoft partner, they have a strong focus on MS-Office/MOSS 2007, including MS-Office Flobots included directly in the processes: that means that an Excel spreadsheet (for example) can be used as the UI at a step in the process instead of using a custom web form.
I’m going to stick around for the deep dive session next, so more detail to come.