Appian beefs up BPM

Appian has released a new version of its well-respected business process management suite. Premiering with this new edition is Appian SAIL, the company’s Self-Assembling Interface Layer that delivers dynamic and responsive Web and native-mobile user interfaces through a "write once, deploy everywhere" architecture. Appian says SAIL makes it easier to design and use solutions that integrate social collaboration, native mobility, flexible cloud/on-premise delivery and enterprise data discovery.

Appian SAIL unites this social, mobile, cloud and information for all employees throughout an organization. It features rules-driven interactivity that creates intelligent and completely dynamic interface experiences for users. Now, says Appian, customers can generate rich, graphical task, record and reporting dashboards that offer fast drill-down for analyzing data trends and getting new perspectives on business performance. In addition, all SAIL interfaces become immediately available on all leading Web browsers and mobile devices with no additional development.

The company reports Appian 7 builds up features such as:

Records--Appian Records discovers and combines enterprise data into a single intuitive interface for users to rapidly find and take action upon data across disparate enterprise systems. Appian Records now has expanded search capabilities to automatically index key fields across all enterprise data sources. In addition, multiple views may be created to give unique perspectives on each record item.

Reporting--New chart types with increased drill behavior allow users to create rich and interactive reporting dashboards for both Web and mobile users.

Rules management--Appian Rules now includes real-time and inline impact analysis. Designers can see all impacted and dependent business rules while they edit.