OpenText updates Metastorm with personnel directory

As part of an update to its Metastorm BPM (business process management) software, content management software provider OpenText has added a personnel directory to its Metastorm Smart Business Workspace product.

"The primary focus of this release is taking what we have learned from social media," said Sandra Moran, OpenText senior director of product marketing.

The company has also updated its Metastorm BPM suite and released a dashboard that can be used to track the health of business processes. BPM software provides the mechanism to automate many common business routines or processes, so they can be completed more quickly and with more oversight.

Metastorm Smart Business Workspace provides a collaborative workspace where employees can run multiple applications and communicate with partners from a single interface. It can work as a front end for Metastorm's entire product suite, including not only the BPM software but also the company's enterprise architecture and data integration tools.

The newly released version 9.0 of the software can offer a directory of employees, which can help the user and even workflow processes find experts in a certain topic more quickly. "User profiles allow companies to define the skills, certifications and capabilities of their employees," Moran said.

Users can search for skillsets, or embed them within a business process workflow, so employees will know who to call when a work item requires in-house expertise to resolve a problem. All the interchanges between the two employees can be captured for later reference.

"It allows us to move work more effectively through the company," Moran said.

For the newly released version 9.1 of the Metastorm BPM suite, OpenText has upgraded the designer interface with additional controls. "We focused on providing a lot more dynamic control of what you can build," Moran said. For instance, designers can now build online forms where input boxes can be greyed out whenever the data does not need to be entered by the user. Also, forms can highlight particularly important bits of information.

The newly released Metastorm Business Performance Intelligence Dashboards "gather statistics and analysis on how business processes are running across an organisation," Moran said. Like the workspace, the dashboard can also provide metrics for Metastorm's data integration and enterprise application products. It can also capture data from some other third party software as well.

These Metastorm releases have been the first major ones for the company since OpenText purchased BPM vendor Metastorm in February.