Appian BPM gets more social and mobile
Connecting state and local government leaders
Appian Records lets users browse, update and take action on data from any enterprise system through a single social interface. Appian SAIL lets designers push BPM apps to mobile devices.
Appian has stepped up efforts to make it easier for agency users to manage, access and update their data, regardless of where it resides.
The company has expanded its suite of business process management tools, adding more mobile and social capabilities to the platform. Appian BPM can be deployed on-premise at an organization or accessed through a cloud infrastructure.
Appian Records, the latest addition to the BPM suite, lets users browse, update and take action on data from any enterprise system through a single social interface. Appian Records is a key component of worksocial, Appian’s integration of work automation, social collaboration and mobile access capabilities in a single enterprise software platform.
Using standard data integration frameworks, Appian Records lets designers quickly define a common and secure method for users to browse and take action on enterprise data sources, company officials said. Appian worksocial lets users discover, securely share, comment and collaborate on their enterprise data with others, expanding participation with Records.
Appian Records also eliminates the time it takes for users to switch between multiple applications to complete business actions. For instance, a user’s “record” could include a variety of data from customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, legal and other systems. A call center representative answering a support call can see the caller’s complete status in one view, and can immediately take the appropriate action, such as launch a trouble ticket to start a resolution process.
Appian Records was unveiled recently at Appian World 2013 by company CEO Matthew Calkins. Calkins also introduced the Self-Assembling Interface Layer (SAIL), an interface that makes it easier to push business process management applications to mobile devices. Using SAIL, business and IT users compose applications in a visual drag-and-drop environment. With the check of a box, that process model becomes a functioning application for the Web and a native mobile app for iOS, BlackBerry and Android mobile platforms, officials said.
This is possible because SAIL renders the application based on the access device, without a single line of code from the developer. SAIL establishes a dialogue between the mobile native client application and a package of objects that contain specific functions of the Appian application, Calkins told GCN.
Traditional development techniques are too cumbersome, requiring developers to write code for each mobile operating system and keep up with changes on each OS. Even using HTML5 to design mobile apps requires the writing of specific codes, Calkins noted. SAIL takes a “write once, publish anywhere” approach letting users “run BPM applications quickly and eloquently from mobile devices,” Calkins said.
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