Extending and Enhancing Microsoft Technologies:
Position Statement - InRule® for SharePoint
InRule Technology is committed to leveraging and extending the investments that
IT organizations have made in Microsoft technologies by supporting and enhancing
the capabilities of those Microsoft technologies. InRule can extend the value of
an organization’s SharePoint investment by providing business logic automation and
decision management capabilities for SharePoint-based applications: InRule can manage
critical business decisions that are governed by various SharePoint elements including
documents, processes, and workflows.
SharePoint applications that use InRule require custom .NET components to link the
two together. While InRule does not yet provide out-of-the-box interoperability
with SharePoint, its business logic automation and business decision management
functionality extends SharePoint via event handlers and workflows. It is InRule
Technology’s position that InRule can and will provide extensive additional value
to SharePoint applications. As a first step, InRule Technology is providing code
samples and our ROAD (Rules Oriented Architecture and Application Design/Development/Deployment)
Services group can assist in the creation of these components and/or provide prescriptive
guidance for an InRule user to build them.
With its rich capabilities, easy adoption by .NET developers, and a presence in
more than 50% of medium and large businesses, SharePoint will become the application
framework for many new applications. Given that both InRule and SharePoint operate
on user-interface and back-end enterprise data using the .NET platform, it is inevitable
that some organizations will look to combine the features of InRule and SharePoint
when designing their IT solutions.
The Value of Using InRule with SharePoint
Including InRule as an extension to SharePoint can help organizations provide additional
value:
- Enhancing the power to make business decisions based on document
and line of business data – InRule allows for the integration of document metadata
with complex business decision logic and back-office data stores. InRule can import
and operate directly with SharePoint list data and SDK objects. InRule also offers
several out-of-the-box rule actions that are not out-of-the-box features in SharePoint.
These InRule actions can be manipulated by business analysts without writing any
code.
- Author and Implement Complex Rules – SharePoint offers simple
business analyst tools for creating rule-like structures and workflows, but it does
not allow for implementing chains of complex rule sets that drive many real business
decisions. SharePoint’s OOB back office integration features are often difficult
to configure and only apply to a small set of real-world problems.
- Deploying Rules without Code Changes– SharePoint has no features
for maintaining or deploying complex rules. Most changes to business logic require
clumsy modifications to production metadata or code changes to custom components.
InRule can provide a clean platform for managing business logic changes without
risking production data loss or incurring downtime.
- Managing Business Rules – Because SharePoint does not allow
complex rules to be managed as shareable assets, changes must be managed within
code. InRule enables the management of rules from development through production
with granular permission, check-in/check-out and version control
InRule also continues to partner with
ShareVis to provide its customers with rich business logic automation capabilities.
DISCLAIMER: InRule for SharePoint position and plans may change at
any time at InRule Technology’s sole discretion based on market opportunities or
other factors, and are not intended to be a commitment to future product or feature
availability in any way. All statements regarding InRule Technology's plans, directions,
and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice.