Appian is kicking off 2011 with another Tips and Tricks webinar covering Integration Best Practices on January 12th, 2011 at Noon EST.

Registration is available on Appian Forum.

Over the past 6 months we’ve been producing a series of educational webinars to teach BPM developers how to take advantage of the full power of Appian.  Previous topics have covered

• How to Easily Create and Share “Plug-ins” in Appian using OSGi
• The Critical Role of Data in Your Process Applications
• Advanced UI and Styling in Appian

(NOTE:  recordings of previous webinars are all available on Appian Forum)

Our next session will cover Tips and Tricks for connecting Appian with your enterprise systems, presented by Jorge Sanchez.

I look forward to seeing you there, and as usual, a recording will be available on Appian Forum.

Malcolm Ross

Director Product Management

Appian Forum members, please join us on December 9th at Noon EST to review the latest features of Appian 6 and updates to the Appian Forum customer support site.

This version of Appian first represents a continuation of Appian’s commitment to deliver a highly scalable and responsive process development environment based on the latest industry standards.  In addition, we have initiated our first release of the Appian Tempo project, bringing an entirely new perspective on process participation.

New in this release, Appian has updated the security architecture allowing easy adoption of  modern authentication frameworks.  Appian customers can now quickly integrate with their enterprise LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos and other custom authentication servers.  More exciting though, is the ability for our customers to use modern authentication techniques like OAuth.  OAuth integration can enable Appian customers to quickly integrate with common cloud providers and consumer social networks like Salesforce.com, Facebook and Twitter, allowing any user of these environments to authenticate with Appian and participate in process events.  This greatly expands the potential for direct consumer process participation in a organization’s key processes and allows for a more intimate interaction between a company and their customers.

Next, we have overhauled our real-time analytics engine to greatly increase the performance and scalability of report performance.  Appian has always differentiated in the BPM industry by being the only vendor to include a native in-memory reporting engine.  This has allowed Appian to deliver unmatched reporting performance with real-time results with very low maintenance.  Now, the number of possible parallel analytics engines has now been expanded to 16, to accommodate truly massive amounts of data for customers needing real-time reports against tens-of-millions of active process instances.

In addition, Appian is continuing to innovate around the merging of MDM and BPM concepts.  This has become a hot topic recently with Forrester publishing a great whitepaper called “Avoid Process Data Headaches: Align Business Process And Data Governance Initiatives”. As customers build more complex process environments, being able to easily connect and govern the data that drives those processes has become increasingly important.  In response, Appian has introduced a new Data Store and Data Designer environment that delivers an easy way for data owners to share and represent data sources in Appian and empower process modelers to work with existing data.  This architecture is highly scalable and uses SOA concepts to represent data objects as re-usable components throughout the BPM platform.

Finally, Appian has released Appian Tempo to select customers to begin experiencing BPM in an entirely new way.  Appian Tempo will revolutionize the way people participate in process.  It’s an entirely different view on process participation which will break down departmental and geographic barriers and connect people in ways that couldn’t be modeled into a traditional BPM process.  For now, we’ll save the details for a early next year, when we’ll be organizing a larger launch event.

As usual, customers and partners can download the latest version of Appian from the Appian Forum site.  Customer’s using the Appian Anywhere SaaS environment will be automatically upgraded to the latest release in the coming weeks.

For a live demonstration of the latest release of Appian, join us for our December 9th, Noon EST event.

Thanks,

Malcolm Ross

Director Product Management

After Appian 6 was released, Appian committed itself to change the way we delivered software.  As our SaaS business has grown, Appian has changed to the development methodology of a SaaS company.  This means, rapid releases, effortless upgrades, and a continuous stream of new features being introduced into the platform.  The pace of innovation at Appian has tripled since the release of Appian 6 and the features in our pipeline are guaranteed to shake-up the BPM market.  As other BPM vendors are looking to cash out and leave their customers holding the bag, Appian is “throwing down the gauntlet” to the competition, challenging them to match Appian in innovation and customer success.

With that note, Appian has made available the latest version of Appian 6 for download from Appian Forum.  Appian Anywhere customers using the Appian SaaS service will be upgraded automatically to the latest version of Appian.

Despite the version number indicator (.0.2), this is no simple patch release, but rather a continuation of Appian’s effort to deliver a continuous stream of innovation to our customers that accelerate process improvement initiatives.

Appian 6 includes new features in the following categories:

• Updated Microsoft SharePoint Integration
• New Password and Security Management Features
• New Rapid Component Development Framework powered by OSGi
• New End-User Interface Features
• New Appian Process Modeler Features
• New Appian Application Builder Features
• Extended BPM Application Migration Enhancements

The above categories are intentionally vague.  To discover the details on each of the new feature areas, please review the Appian 6 Release Notes available on Appian Forum.

On April 22nd, at 12 pm EDT, we’ll be hosting a webinar for our customers and partners to review these new features as well as the pipeline of new features about to be released.  Registration for the webinar is available at Appian Forum.

Look forward to seeing you there,

Malcolm Ross, Director Product Management

The great thing about Forrester’s Index is that it doesn’t just identify where your BPM project sits on the Anemic/Lean/Bloated scale; it actually gives you a tactical plan for beefing up or scaling down as needed to hit the Lean sweet-spot. It’s an invaluable tool in the process improvement arsenal.

You can hear Clay explain it for himself in our upcoming webinar, “Hitting the Lean BPM Target,” on March 11 at 11:00am ET. He’ll tell you what you need to know to make Lean BPM work in your organization today, and he’ll use Appian customer case examples to show how striving for Lean leads to accelerated returns.

Don’t miss this one. Register via the link above.

Ben Farrell

Director of Corporate Communications

With the launch of Appian 6, we have delivered the market’s fastest platform for BPM application development, deployment, adoption and use. This BPM acceleration means you can get to OpTempo quickly, and maintain in through rapid cycles of optimization. Combine this speed with “fit-for-purpose” interfaces, rich collaboration and Application Templates, and you have a recipe for Lean. On that note, please sample the more than 25 new templates (and hundreds of other resources) available in the new Appian Forum online community. Appian Forum combines the existing Appian Access and Appian ShareBase with a host of new content and collaboration features.

BPM has thrived as a result of the shrinking economy. As we look ahead to eventual recovery, we believe that BPM interest will only grow. Appian is committed to making your BPM efforts achieve rapid success, and we look forward to taking the journey with you.

Here’s to a bright future!

Samir Gulati

Vice President of Marketing

The Appian Forum was kicked off by Forrester Vice President and Research Director Connie Moore .  Followed by Connie, we had six great customer presentations by Nokia Siemens Network, AGF, Archstone, Defense Acquisition University, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and Mercer HR Consulting on how they managed their BPM implementation.  In addition, presentations were provided by Appian partners on BPM best practices, methodologies and tools by Satyam, SMART, Oakbrook Solutions, and Mega.

On the second day, Appian held a number of technical sessions providing tips and tricks in managing your BPM systems, code examples for performing some more complex actions, best practices in setting up your BPM initiative, and some sneak peeks on future versions of Appian Enterprise.

I’d certainly like to provide a special thank you to Sandy Kemsley for providing detailed blogs and summaries of each presentation.  Sandy takes time from her busy schedule to attend these sessions and provide useful feedback in improving our conferences.  Next time Sandy we’ll try to have a power plug nearby to keep you going throughout the day.

Overall, we could not have asked for a better event.  We had close to 200 total attendees, a great location at the Ritz Carlton, informative presentations, and even beautiful weather.

Thanks again to everyone who attended.  If you happened to miss it, all the presentations are available on Appian Access.  We look forward to seeing everyone at the next Appian Forum.

Malcolm Ross

If you have never been involved with organizing a global user conference, suffice to say, a lot of planning and effort goes into these events to ensure their success.  Appian started the planning process in December, 2007 with site visits of potential locations, lining up agendas, and selecting the best dates that will drive the most attendance.  

After much wrangling with event locations, we selected the Ritz Carlton Tysons Corner as the best facility that would allow for the most interaction in a quality setting.  Maybe to the displeasure of a few, we did not choose the golf resort and spa, in favor of a location that was conveinent to the Appian headquarters for one-on-one meetings with any of our technology and implementation professionals.  We also purposely selected a date that would be sure to drive the most interest and discussion in the DC area around BPM, the week of the Gartner BPM Summit.  The timing with the Gartner event has been much appreciated by Appian customers like Nokia Siemens Networks and Archstone who will be speaking at both events, and press who appreciate being able to easily attend both events in a single week.

I hope you will be able to join us for the first Appian Forum on September 8th, 9th, and 10th and find out what we and our customers have been up to with the Appian Enterprise product.  If you have not had a chance to register already, please check out our dedicated website for Appian Forum and register for the events and seminars.  We promise these sessions will be valuable in learning how customers have realized big efficiency gains in their BPM implementation, technical tips-and-tricks in making your Appian Enterprise deployment better, and finally what the latest features of Appian Enterprise will have to offer.

Thanks and hope to see you there.

Malcolm Ross

Director Product Management