InRule for BizTalk Server

Automating business processes can deliver great efficiency gains to an organization. But automation alone cannot deliver the agility and flexibility organizations need to respond to changing requirements and market conditions — applications must adapt quickly to changes in business processes and the underlying decision logic that supports them. That's where the powerful combination of business rules and business process management comes in.

InRule for BizTalk Server empowers business and technical users to easily author, test and manage complex rules and calculations for BizTalk applications.

Microsoft BizTalk Server is a business process management (BPM) server that enables organizations to automate and optimize mission-critical business processes that span across applications, people, and organizations.

InRule for BizTalk Server allows BizTalk Server users to experience powerful rule authoring and verification that is intuitive enough for business users, yet robust enough for developers.

Underlying many complex business processes are business rules: application decision logic that involves rules, calculations and dynamic user interfaces. By exposing and externalizing frequently changing business logic, InRule for BizTalk Server enables organizations to quickly change underlying rules and calculations—without custom coding—by providing an environment for business analysts and business users to author and maintain rules.

InRule and BizTalk Server

InRule for BizTalk Server allows execution of rule applications from BizTalk orchestrations via InRule's BizTalk adapter and static .NET classes, providing the flexibility required by demanding enterprise applications.

Harnessing the Power of InRule

A key BizTalk feature that helps developers integrate applications, BizTalk Orchestrations enable users to define the logical order of actions and associated messages that define a business process. BizTalk Orchestrations enable organizations to integrate complex processes across organizations and platforms. InRule for BizTalk Server enables business rules to be integrated within these complex processes by enabling rule applications to be called as part of a BizTalk Orchestration.

Empower Business Analysts and Users to Author, Test, and Maintain Rules

InRule for BizTalk Server delivers an intuitive user interface to make authoring complex business rules easy for both technical and non-technical users.

Rules may be created in Business Language, the more technical Syntax Language, or Decision Tables. Beyond the point-and-click building of a rule is the ability to naturally type a rule statement and have the editor intelligently prompt for choices. Context sensitive prompts are available in all three authoring modes.

Business Language Authoring - Enlarge

Business Language Authoring

InRule for BizTalk Server's Business Language Authoring capability offers an abstracted way to author rules, using English-like syntax and point-and-click authoring.

Syntax Language Authoring

Syntax Language authoring provides function-level access to expressions, using Excel-like syntax with IntelliSense prompts.

Advanced decision table support

Decision Tables are a powerful technique to represent a set of related business rules in the form of tables. Business experts can easily check the logic represented by a Decision Table, preventing common anomalies in rules systems such as rules that are redundant or conflicting or rules that contain circular logic.

InRule for BizTalk Server also provides consistency checking and auto-generation of Decision Table to prevent missing logic.

irAuthor - Decision Table

Decision Table - Enlarge

Automates and Simplifies Complex Business Logic

InRule for BizTalk Server provides many capabilities, such as IF-THEN-ELSE logic, to ease the authoring and maintenance of complex business logic. Decision tables streamline complex logic that would otherwise require multiple nested IF statements. Rules may be run in auto-optimized order or in a user-specified order.

Context-defined rule sets

Users can also define rules that are applied depending on the context in which a field is used, providing users with greater flexibility in reusing entities from multiple fields and collections, while ensuring that rules are applied appropriately and consistently based on an entity's context.

Advanced Rule Authoring for Collections

Because it is optimized for .NET, InRule for BizTalk Server provides advanced capabilities for handling collections. Functions for filtering, sorting, and working with nested collections significantly reduce complexity of authoring rules for sets of data. With these capabilities, users can easily run rules for every member of a collection or apply rules only to items in a collection that meet a certain condition.

Extensive Functions and Actions

InRule for BizTalk Server includes a library of more than 100 functions to enable rule authors to perform aggregate logic, table lookups, date math, comparisons, conversions, string operations, math functions, and other routine operations.

Web Based Rule Management with AJAX Functionality

For web-based applications, Business Language Authoring and decision table controls are implemented as a set of embeddable web controls, providing greater flexibility in determining where rules can be maintained and edited.

Easily Manage Rule Versions and Permissions Across the Enterprise

With version control, role-based security, and granular permissions, irCatalog provides an intuitive management tool for Business Rules. This feature provides a comprehensive set of services to store, version, check-in/check-out, and set security for rules. Granular permissions can be defined for accessing catalog and rule application elements: InRule for BizTalk Server allows administrators to specify role-based security at the Schema, Data, Ruleset and Rule levels. Permissions may be explicitly assigned or denied at any level from irCatalog down for a Role, overriding inherited settings for that Role.

As rule applications are checked-out, modified, and checked-in, new versions are created and managed. At run-time, applications can choose to retrieve rule applications from irCatalog by latest "published" version, by label, or by specific version number.

irCatalog provides the ability to store, version, check-in/check-out, and set permissions on rules across the enterprise. Multiple rule repositories can be registered for each staging environment, making it easier to promote applications from one stage to another (e.g., from testing to production.) A central administration interface provides visual control for managing multiple repositories.

Real-time Rule Testing and Verification

InRule for BizTalk Server includes a full-featured testing tool that enables users to test entities and rule sets immediately, even without a completed application. Using the testing tool, users can enter data into fields, add and delete collection members, view rule execution information, execute rule sets and actions, and load and save testing information for regression testing—all without a separate testing environment.

The Watch List pane lets users create a list of fields to track, so that only relevant or critical values are shown. This helps users focus on fields that concern them and makes the verification process more efficient.

Include Rules Applications within BizTalk Server Orchestrations

InRule for BizTalk Server enables business rules to be integrated within a larger business process by enabling rule applications to be called as part of a BizTalk Orchestration.

Extending the Power of BizTalk to More Business Users

By providing the ability for business analysts and business users to author and maintain rules, InRule for BizTalk Server extends the power of BizTalk to a broader audience for more agile applications with less burden on IT.