We got together recently at teched, and spoke about the concept of workflow, and SharePoint being a great host for human based workflow.
No I have not changed my spots to become a SharePoint person, I have enhanced my spots my looking above and beyond what just BizTalk can offer. There is a lot more to life these days, for those who have been living in the dark, there is the whole world of connected systems, and workflow foundation.
The opportunities to use the technology that BizTalk started have expanded. This is one example of thinking out side of the box, and taking full advantage of this technology. It may even go as far as explain where BizTalk is positioned in light of Dublin, and the new WF 4.0.
SharePoint is a good user interface, it can provide workflow capabilities, but more importantly it can draw users in and get them to fill in forms and answer the questions that a human based workflow might require, such as approvals, or provide this invoice, and the like, these can all be handled in a document library in SharePoint. They are placed there perhaps as part of a workflow, or part of a business process.
However with most workflow or business processes, they need to end somewhere, where is that end point, is it when the manager clicks approve, or the requested document is uploaded.... then someone manually prints these off and acts on them ??? this occurs more often as the rule, the fact that the document or the approval is recorded in SharePoint is enough, and I have a nice list of approved items...
This is NOT where it should end, what happens to the printed document, it is given to someone to manually make entries in another system, update items in a second system, and then print something else from a third system, and then fax that to someone, perhaps an order.... All of this is manual, it takes time and is totally redundant.....
We have the technology, we have proven technology, to take that request that was approved in SharePoint and act on it electronically, and perform the final steps automatically.
BizTalk can read from SharePoint, it can be configured to wait for approved documents in the document library. It can communicate with your internal systems, update details, it can even orchestrate a back end process for this, that would follow your current process. It can even FAX the order to the destination company. Removing all of these manual steps.
It might not seem like much, but for even order, or request where there can be as little as 100,000 requests a year, it adds up, $50 per request is saved, 100,000 * $50 = wait for it....
5 Million, you can save 5 million dollars a year, by removing this small step.......???
The question is out to you, why wouldn't you do this???? do you like NOT having an extra 5 million in your pocket????
The technology to do this, does not cost 5 million, and this is just for one process, what about all of the others???
Is your brain ticking over yet??? Well have a look at my video we made at teched, where we talk about this a bit more. It was a bit of a rushed video and we didn't have much prep time, as we were all doing sessions, however it explains it.
http://www.msteched.com/online/view.aspx?tid=d34cf89c-bcd2-44eb-94e5-836cf7fe92b7
If you want to know more contact me: paul@somers.com
As far as where does Dublin fit here, Dublin hosts the workflow, much like BizTalk hosts the orchestration and the communication to end points. Dublin workflows could call BizTalk to kick off the back end communication and orchestration process, and get a result when they are done. In this way the workflow/human workflow can interact with back end systems, in a correctly architected manner.
