While the company had offered an amount of integration with Office prior to this release, the new product means that any employee can participate in any business process directly from Microsoft Office software on their desktop, including Word, Excel, Outlook, and InfoPath – without necessarily knowing that they are participating in a BPM process.
The company claimed that the new level of integration with Office has the potential to drastically cut the training required for users to participate in BPM, while also potentially boosting their productivity.
For instance users who are frequently disconnected from their network can do process work offline in Office, updating their processes when they reconnect. Process performance can be managed directly from Outlook, without the need to setup and maintain separate portals, and letters written in Microsoft Word can automatically incorporate process information, such as current status of a loan application.
The company said that it was able to work with Microsoft on the integration as it is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Indeed Lombardi said it is the only BPM vendor certified with an Information Worker competency by Microsoft, which helped ensure its software supports the familiar end user experience within Microsoft Office, as well as its enterprise deployment technologies.
Lombardi competes with a large number of vendors in the BPM space, including the likes of Tibco, Metastorm, Savvion, Fair Isaac, Intalio, HandySoft and Fuego, which was recently acquired by BEA.
