BALTIMORE, MD-- December 05, 2006 -- Metastorm, a leading provider of Business Process Management (BPM) software for modeling, automating, integrating, and improving both human and system-based processes and the only enterprise BPM Suite natively developed on a .NET platform, today announced its support for Microsoft’s latest offerings of Windows Vista and Office 2007. Metastorm was the first BPM vendor to provide a BPM client for Microsoft Outlook in 2002, and the first BPM vendor to provide support for Microsoft SharePoint in 2004. With its latest support for Vista and Office 2007, Metastorm has taken full advantage of Microsoft’s new capabilities to deliver even tighter integration between Microsoft desktop applications and Metastorm BPM™.

Using a process-integrated .NET forms capability, Metastorm has consistently met the needs of organizations looking to manage and automate critical human-centric, highly structured business processes and organizations who have a need to take process-centric work offline in Outlook.

With its latest offering, Metastorm is using the Microsoft Office 2007 platform to more actively engage business users in creative, collaborative, ad hoc, and loosely-structured business processes. These processes are critical to helping organizations reach strategic business goals and require a new way of looking at how people participate in processes and monitor and control their work and activities.

To allow these processes to benefit from the power of Metastorm BPM while still maintaining the working environment that users are accustomed to, Metastorm is leveraging the Office 2007 suite to allow documents, messages, presentations, and spreadsheets to be process-enablers and the Office 2007 applications to serve as the BPM “client.” The goal is to allow business users and managers to engage in creative and collaborative processes using the tools that are natural in their workday – Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Excel – rather than accessing a separate interface. This new perspective on BPM allows organizations to extend the benefits of process management to a greater number of people in an intuitive and effective way.

The Metastorm BPM solution makes user participation in both highly managed and collaborative processes nearly transparent for users of Vista and Office 2007 – providing even greater agility while still delivering the same level of benefits in efficiency and control. Metastorm is doing this by extending its Outlook Process Client to the entire Office 2007 suite and using key Vista technologies to incorporate feedback and critical process information. Users will be able to participate in a Metastorm process by using Microsoft Office as an interface to the enterprise process engine.

Examples of how Metastorm BPM has incorporated many new features of the Vista and Office 2007 platforms include:

• The Microsoft Office Ribbon Bar and Task Pane to allow Metastorm BPM processes to be initiated and actions completed.
• The Microsoft Office Task Pane to allow Metastorm BPM process information to be searched for and used in workbooks and documents.
• Microsoft Office Smart Tag technology is leveraged in Metastorm BPM to allow “Process Live” workbooks, documents, and presentations.
• A complete process portal is made available via the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
• Metastorm BPM processes exposed through SharePoint can be configured using Workflow Foundation and the Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007.
• Workflows using the Workflow Foundation platform have full access to initiate, control, and coordinate with Metastorm BPM processes.

“Building deeper integration between Metastorm BPM and Windows Vista and Office 2007 demonstrates how Metastorm is continuing to expand our relationship with Microsoft and continue to help customers achieve new levels of agility,” stated Greg Carter, CTO and vice president of Product Development for Metastorm. “The announcement today is a great example of how Metastorm enables customers to deploy the best enterprise BPM solutions and at the same time extend the value of their existing investment in Microsoft technologies.”