First Look: appStrategy Business Rules Engine

I got an update from the folks at appStrategy today. appStrategy started in 2003 and is based in Washington DC with offices also in France and the UK. Their business rules product suite was announced today and consists of a business user studio, a plugin for Visual Studio, server products and tools for integration with other applications.

The new business rules capability is based on Windows Workflow Foundation (as are their other automation capabilities). The rules capability is part of their overall suite which includes workflow automation, data and system integration, deployment and governance capabilities. In particular they have a very large activity library for Windows Workflow Foundation handling access to other applications or instance as well as a large set of actions tied deeply into the target applications like SAP Salesforce, or Dynamics CRM.

Business rules can be defined as decision tables and as rulesets. Rules can be managed in their business user appRules Studio (which also allows non technical users to define workflow) or using their appRules plugin for Visual Studio. appRules Studio is a classic windows application with the ability to drag and drop elements on to a workflow. Data sources can be picked from the integrated applications. Decision Tables and if_then_elseif rulesets can be embedded in the flow and edited. These rules can access the same data from the connected applications, set values in them or manipulate temporary variables. Decision tables and Rulesets can be reused between flows and some governance and logging capabilities are in place.

Both environments allow access to their activity library which goes deep into many of the packages being integrated, allowing application specific actions like converting a quote to a sales order, for instance. Deployment packages can be deployed to an express or enterprise server on premise, on Azure or on Amazon EC2.

appStrategy is one of the vendors in our Decision Management Systems Platform Technologies Report and you can get more information about their products at  www.appstrategy.com