BP-3 Reviews Blueprint

Scott Francis from BP-3 recently posted a great, objective review of the Blueprint Summer ‘08 release. He does a thorough and insightful job covering the entire product. For example, here’s his take on the Visio import functionality we recently introduced:

Visio importing has long been the “holy grail” for process modeling tools.  If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me if a particular BPM product could import Visio models directly I would be rich!  However, Visio import into a process execution environment isn’t always all its cracked up to be.  Visio diagrams tend to be quite unstructured, whereas BPMN is very structured, and executable BPMN is even more structured in form.  Moreover, Visio models don’t have enough information attached to them to be immediately executable.  It is possible to run into issues of “who owns this model” once you import the Visio (the business may have the expectation that they can keep making modifications and “reimport” into Teamworks, for example).  At some point, the implementors must take over the model and own it to produce something executable.  I’ve been working on some models for OMG certification and I thought they would be a fun (albeit simple) set of examples to import into Blueprint for a test drive.  Blueprint imports these easily and accurately.  I went back to the archives and tried importing some really awful process diagrams circa 2004.  The results weren’t pretty (the original wasn’t pretty), but Blueprint imported the models nicely (a visio diagram with 10 tabs and one process per tab).  Going to the Diagram View I was able to sort out the diagram into swimlanes and go from there.  Interestingly, when I imported a diagram WITH swimlanes defined, Blueprint created those swimlanes and participants for me.

But my favorite quote had to be:

I actually like the diagramming portion better than Teamworks!  And collaborating on the same process isn’t just possible, its actually cool.  You almost look for an excuse to try to be logged into the same process at the same time so you can try to step on each other.  Blueprint handles all the conflicting edits really well.  I’m impressed!

We’re very proud of Blueprint’s collaboration and diagramming capabilities as well because we believe that there’s no tool that’s easier to use or can make you more productive, online or off.

Take a look at Scott’s full review when you get a chance.