Metastorm Version 9.x delivers many new capabilities that will bring benefits to your organization over and above those delivered by previous versions. Once your developers have adjusted to the new version, their productivity will improve. This blog post discusses why you should consider migrating to Version 9.x.
Productivity
The new 9.x Designer was heavily influenced by feedback from the customer base. As a result, the designer has changed significantly to better meet your need to build larger and more complex processes. The new version 9 Designer is written on Microsoft’s .NET platform and takes advantage of many of the latest Microsoft technologies including C#. C# has experienced rapid market growth since its introduction and has been adopted as the standard .NET technology within Microsoft centric organizations. C# is the default language in v9.x for server-side scripts and provides tight integration with the new expression language in version 9 allowing you to maximize your team’s developer skills.
Once your process developers have become accustomed to using the Version 9 designer, there are many new features that will improve their productivity. These range from Snap to line and the horizontal and vertical spacing commands for forms, the Designer remembering database access credentials and form templates, Intellisense, in-place validation and the ability to debug processes with Visual Studio.
End User Experience
In addition to the features that enhance developer productivity, Version 9.x offers new capabilities to boost the end user experience. Users will be happy to see the addition of Custom Lists for the out-of-the box web client, status fields in grids, the capability to work in the language of their choice (a single process can be delivered in multiple languages) or the completely new reporting capability. There is much to enhance the user experience.
Governance
If process governance is important to you, another valuable feature is the separate deployment service which allows the explicit separation of responsibilities, and support for unattended and automated deployment making it much easier for you to be SOX compliant.
Strategy to Execution
Version 9 moves nearer to a vision of Strategy to Execution. The version 9 Designer has taken advantage of a number of the features in OpenText ProVision to further improve its ease of use and make it simple for a process analyst to switch between the two environments.
Enhancements to the Designer include a Navigation Pane based on the ProVision navigation pane, the introduction of Swim lanes, the introduction of Zoom and new Styling options for the process map that offer ProVision like styles as well as the standard Stage Action Role style.
ProVision Connect for Metastorm has been enhanced to take advantage of these new features and is now a two way connector additionally allowing a Metastorm process model to be transferred to ProVision for simulation and comparison with other ProVision models.
