For Appian World 2012, we will be featuring a BPM Beginner, Appian Developer, and Business track featuring.  Each track will feature a variety of customer case studies, 3rd party analyst / BPM expert perspectives, and learning sessions to ensure success in your BPM endeavors.

In addition, we have added a 4th training day for those attendees wishing to get even more training on aspects of the Appian product.

For a full break-down of the agenda, please visit our Appian World 2012 agenda page.

We look forward to seeing many familiar and new faces this year.  Be sure to register early, registration is free but seating is limited.

Malcolm Ross

Director Product Management

Appian recently released our biggest update yet to the Google Android platform.  We have seen interest in Android surge from our clients and we are happy to announce that our Android mobile client is now at parity with our Apple iOS mobile offering.

For clients who use Appian’s Android version, you will notice that the interface is different from the Apple release and optimized to be friendly and familiar for Android users.  In addition, Appian Forms support has been updated on Android to support all the great features Apple users have enjoyed, such as intelligent pickers and rich media capture from the mobile camera and mic.

Appian has seen interest in Mobile BPM continue to surge with a growing list of expanded use cases and potential for process optimization.  Some Mobile BPM examples we are currently implementing include:  field engineering support, break-fix, field inspections, at home healthcare and nurse management, and mobile spend requests and approvals.

Demand for mobile access to critical business processes will grow for many more years as we all come to depend upon our mobile devices to perform more and more tasks previously only possible on our desktop/laptop computers.

For Appian customers, you can download and start using the latest version of the Appian Android mobile client from the Google Android Market.  For just the curious, try signing up for a free Appian trial and explore the Appian BPM Suite as well as this Android mobile client update.

Thanks,

Malcolm Ross

Director, Product Management

]]> http://www.appian.com/blog/2012/01/04/appian-android-mobile-bpm-update/feed 0 http://www.appian.com/blog/2011/10/11/appian-tips-and-tricks-webinar-appian-reference-app-oct-27th-noon-est http://www.appian.com/blog/2011/10/11/appian-tips-and-tricks-webinar-appian-reference-app-oct-27th-noon-est#comments Tue, 11 Oct 2011 14:28:18 +0000 Malcolm Ross http://www.appian.com/blog/?p=3623 Appian has scheduled our next Appian Tips and Tricks webinar for October 27th at Noon EST, 5 PM BST.  During this webinar Appian will be introducing our new Reference App

Appian already provides a large set of reference apps covering HR On-boarding and Security Processing, Federal Procurement and a host of process areas in Financial Services, Insurance, Healthcare and other industries. The new Appian Reference App provides a “guided tour” for building applications from specifications to design to final product, capitalizing on Appian’s best-practice delivery methodology and incorporating Appian’s latest Mobile BPM and Social BPM capabilities. It will be continuously upgraded in step with all future enhancements to Appian functionality.

The new Appian Reference App makes it easy for developers to quickly create high-value process applications by:

• Demonstrating Appian best practices in process application development
• Following Appian’s proven STAR Methodology (Strategize, Transform, Actualize and Rollout)
• Providing examples of both simple and complex Appian software features
• Showing how to get the most out of Appian’s mobile features and social business interface
• Including detailed explanations and annotations for all parts of the application
• Including two fully working process applications, as well as a collection of standalone example models

In this webinar, Jed Fonner, Principal Consultant, will provide a guided tour of the entire Reference App and how to use it’s sample models, rules, forms, expressions, and other artifacts to enhance your own Appian implementation.

This webinar is for Appian Forum members only.  If you cannot attend the live webinar, like all previous Tips and Tricks sessions, a recording will be made and published to Appian Forum.

Thanks and we look forward to seeing you on Oct 27th. Register Here

Malcolm Ross
Director, Product Management

A few days ago, His Majesty King Abdullah II and Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah personally met with the Board of Trustees of the National Council for Family Affairs regarding the initiative and to review a presentation of the Appian software prepared by Mohammad Abusinnah (Appian’s Program Manager for the Middle East) and software engineers from SSS Process, a subsidiary of SSS IT, Appian’s strategic business partner in KSA and Jordan.  The image below is of His and Her Majesty at the review meeting.

This latest implementation adds to a growing list of successes Appian holds in the Middle East region, including Bank Al Jazira, Jordan Dubai Capital, Saudi Credit and Savings Bank, and many more.  Appian’s Jordan based engineers have put great effort into ensuring our software meets the region’s unique requirements, including full Islamic Calendars support and a complete Arabic language user interface.

A full text of the source article is available here with a Google English translation available here.

Thanks,

Malcolm Ross

Director Product Management

Appian is making available two webinars to accomodate our customers in the Americas and Europe on Sept 14th at 12 pm EST as well as in Asia, Australia and New Zealand on Sept 15th at 12 pm AEST.  Registration is available here:

• Appian Q3 2011 Product Announcement Webinar – Americas / EMEA - Sept 14th 12 PM EST
• Appian Q3 2011 Product Announcement Webinar – Asia / Australia / New Zealand – Sept 15th at 12 PM AEST

Our latest release of Appian includes many new features that will make it easier for developers and users to visualize, find, and update enterprise data sources from their Appian process applications.   In addition, Appian has added new expression functionality to our start forms, and expanded our platform support to accommodate more server options for our on-premise customers.

In this webinar we will be providing a detailed walk-through of the new features and functions with live Q&A.

Like previous product webinars, this event is held exclusively for Appian Forum members.  If you do not have an account for Appian Forum, you can register from the login screen.  Also, if you cannot attend the live conference, a full recording of the event will be available for replay from the Appian Forum community site.

Hope to see you there,

Malcolm Ross

Director Product Management

Do we optimize our web interface for mobile or build native mobile client applications?

Luckily we saw the same benefits that mobile users are seeing.  Despite the wonderful developments of HTML 5, native client apps for mobile devices provide an overall superior end-user experience.

A recent Nielesen Media report on Smartphone Analytics shows that on average Android users are in agreement, spending 2/3 of their time inside native mobile apps rather web apps.

It’s an important trend that businesses need to consider when building enterpise mobile applications.  Businesses will find a number of benefits in native mobile apps that equate to real efficiency gains, improve data gathering, and greater customer/employee satisfaction, such as:

Native mobile client apps deliver :

1)   Faster and more responsive navigation than mobile optimized web apps.

2)   Better access to unique abilities of mobile devices, such as Cameras, Voice Capture, Accelerometers, GPS Location, SMS, Telecommunications, and local file libraries.

3)   Availability on Application Stores that provide better marketing exposure and increased brand awareness

4)   Better security options with the ability to create custom encrypted data stores for storing content rather rely on mobile OS security, as well as control over which devices can install the app.

5)   Overall better usability which can lower training costs and speed adoption.

HTML 5 shows much promise, but the smart businesses are choosing enterprise applications that use native mobile apps rather web apps to ensure successful adoption of new enterprise mobile applications.

As always, if you’d like to take Appian’s native apps for a spin, Appian Mobile apps are on the Apple, Google, and RIM BlackBerry application stores.  Free trials of Appian are available on the Appian.com website.

Thanks,

Malcolm Ross

Director Product Management

Well just a few weeks later, we’ve been able to add another update to our Mobile BPM offering that includes voice capture and playback directly inside an Appian task or form.

This great new feature enhances the productivity of Appian BPM users by not requiring them to enter information on sometimes impossibly small keyboards on their mobile device.  With a single click, users can now record voice notes and embed them directly inside the electronic form.  Voice notes can be routed and shared inside an Appian BPM process model, or even routed to a Speech to Text web service to convert the audio voice note to a searchable text string.

To see a demonstration of this, and other great new features, check out our recent Mobile BPM webinar.  The last 30 minutes of the webinar provide a demonstration of the capabilities that Appian Mobile BPM can bring to your enterprise processes.

Thanks,

Malcolm Ross, Director, Product Management

To get some answers we need to look at consumer trends in social platform adoption by asking a simple question:

“What are consumer social platforms replacing?”

It is clear that one of the major losers in consumer social adoption are consumer portal platforms like Yahoo and AOL.  Portals traditionally presented an isolated view of the internet based on one person’s perspective, where in contrast Social is providing a connected and integrated view.  In addition, a number of key features are behind rapid Social platform growth, including:

1. Activity Stream Content Aggregation
2. Contextual Collaboration and Content Sharing
3. Simplified UI
4. Mobility
5. REST
6. OAuth (many enterprises don’t know what this is, but it is huge in consumer social and will soon change the nature of enterprise SSO)
7. Social Analytics

I could write an entire blog post on how each of these 7 features is a game changer that is killing portals and driving social platform adoption, but will save that for another day.

Taking these consumer trends into consideration, enterprises should really take a step back and think about what they’ve done with enterprise portals over the past 10 years and how enterprise portals can be replaced through Social platform adoption.  It is important to look at Social much like portal was viewed.  Social, like Portal, must be horizontal across systems, departments and functions and also  perform content aggregation and SSO.  This perspective will avoid common social platform failures, such as tying social to an individual system, or not connecting social with your enterprise systems and content.

Thanks,

Malcolm Ross, Director Product Management

Appian’s unique in-memory execution and analytic environment has delivered huge value and fast performance that our competitors are just starting to discover.  In-memory architecture enables developers to focus on process design while getting fast analytic performance across all their data for free.  Every data point and action in Appian becomes instantly reportable, even at huge volume, without a developer creating a separate data scheme tuned just for reporting.   These benefits ultimately deliver the agility necessary in a BPM system to change processes quickly and rapidly adapt to your dynamic business.

Like any datastore, Appian’s analytic environment can be tuned to achieve ever greater reporting speeds and efficiency.  During this Tips and Tricks session we will cover important information that Appian Administrators should know to better  manage their Appian environment and configure their server architecture and reports to achieve maximum performance.

Like all Appian Tips and Tricks sessions, if you cannot join us for the live event on June 30th at Noon EST, we will be hosting a full recording of the event on the Appian Forum site.

Thanks and hope to see you there,

Malcolm Ross

Director Product Management

Appian has made big investments to place us as the market leader for Mobile BPM solutions.  The trends are obvious, with Gartner reporting web traffic from mobile devices to exceed PC devices by 2013, enterprises cannot afford to overlook the mobile revolution upon us.  IT professionals need to be looking for solutions today that provide mobile access to key business processes that drive further efficiency and growth.

Mobile access is a huge missing gap in enabling process efficiency with BPM.  You can spend all the time you want creating optimized processes, but if the workers who participate in those processes can only access them while bound to their desks, you will always have an efficiency barrier.  Mobile BPM enables your workers to stay constantly connected to process; naturally reducing task approvals times and providing access to information at the point of decision.

We invite you to experience Appian’s Mobile BPM solutions today by registering for a Free Appian trial and downloading Appian’s mobile BPM solutions from the public app stores.

Thanks,

Malcolm Ross

Director, Product Management