Yesterday, we had a special day here at ARIS product development. For a full-day workshop, all developers and development managers of our modelling products met to present the latest features. Additional units dialled in, because we also have development offices all over Europe, not just in Saarbrücken, Germany. There are some strict rules for this workshop: First, number of Powerpoint slides must be reduced to an absolute minimum. Second, only those features are allowed to be demonstrated, which are not yet shipped to any customer. The major goal of this workshop is seeing running code!
This workshop is conducted to inform every development unit about what is coming next. Also, it is interesting to see what your colleagues are currently working on. And of course, you are always waiting that the demo of another unit is crashing during the demonstration ;-)
Many of the features demonstrated will be available this quarter with the next service release of ARIS Platform or the next release of ARIS Express. But some demos also showed future developments with major architectural changes to the underlying ARIS technology.
I am not allowed to reveal all the features I saw, but I can at least name a few. For example, I saw how BPMN 2 modelling will look like in ARIS and ARIS Express. The work done so far looks really promising! Also, the innovative features of ARIS Express such as mini toolbar, smart designs, and model fragments are made available in our professional products, too. Here, the engineers did not just copy over the features, but adapted those to professional needs. For example, you will be able to define your own smart designs. Another nice presentation showed how to import an ARIS Express or Microsoft Visio model into ARIS Business Architect.
There are also good news for SAP geeks. One demo focused on a heavily improved integration of ARIS BI Modeler and SAP Business Warehouse. I guess, this new feature will greatly help people working in such SAP BI projects. Another presentation showed how ARIS Process Governance is used internally to automate some governance processes. It is always nice to see that we use our own products. Finally, I also saw a live demonstration integrating ARIS and Software AG products, which you will be able to see at CeBIT 2010.
I’m not sure what the most appreciated presentation was, but I think it might have been the demo of ARIS Rocket Search. It is really an eye catcher ;-)
By the way: Theo Priestley of BPM Redux recently interviewed me about my ideas about BPM, ARIS and ARIS Community. If you are interested, take a look at the interview.
