Happy users = successful software projects.
But compelling user experiences can only be achieved by the effective combination of business requirements, user-centered design, and app development. Getting there hasn’t always been easy – until now.
BPM solutions are great for digital transformation projects because they are so effective in aligning business and IT to deliver business apps optimized to the unique needs of the enterprise’s users, processes, and systems. BPM enables this with tools for business-savy developers to easily translate business requirements directly into apps, without requiring an army of coders and designers. If you think using model-driven, visual app dev tools means you need to compromise on user experience – think again.
We’ve continued to evolve IBM BPM to meet the increasing demands of business users who expect the tools they use at work to resemble those they use at home. BPM Coaches are screens, based upon our open Coach UI framework, comprised of Coach View UI controls and human services UI logic, and modeled with our Process Designer. While IBM provides Coach Views, you can also develop your own using any HTML/JavaScript web framework of your choosing. Using just a browser, you can build UIs with drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG tooling, with configuration and no coding. For design we provide grid layout for sophisticated screen content, responsive design for multiple screen sizes, and themes for styling. Our playback features allow you to review and modify the UI collaboratively with stakeholders, without requiring deployment. Our Process Portal gives business users the ability to collaborate on work tasks and to manage teams. It enables flexible configuration and full customization, and provides an appealing visual design based upon IBM Design Language. It includes federation features that enable your IT team to run apps across multiple BPM environments and versions, while giving users a seamless, single point of entry to BPM. All of this gives business users to access to their apps anywhere from any device – desktop or mobile.
And now we’re upping the ante.
Today IBM is pleased to announce an expanded partnership with Salient Process to enhance and extend the custom user interface capabilities within IBM Business Process Manager (BPM). Under the new partnership, we are now reselling technical support for the Salient Process SPARK UI Toolkits for IBM BPM, we have obtained the rights to use the technology in IBM products, and we are collaborating with Salient Process in its ongoing development.
The SPARK UI Toolkits bring two key things to IBM BPM so you can even more quickly and easily develop UIs that will thrill your users:
- Comprehensive set of Coach Views to address any business user need
- Useful development extensions to the Coach framework to simplify UI logic
The SPARK UI Toolkits include 90+ Coach Views that provide not only a complete set of the essential business app functions, but also include custom charts with drill-down, high-performance data grids, as well as mobile-specific functions such as geo location and sensors, among others. The development extensions to the Coach framework include formula-based UI logic (validations, derived values, visibility, etc.) that can be attached to any UI event. Furthermore, in addition to the UI Toolkit, the SPARK Toolkits solution includes the External Participant and Portal Builder as well, so you get the benefit of all three.
While Salient Process has offered the SPARK UI Toolkits for quite some time where it has been proven in many IBM BPM customer deployments, with this announcement it becomes an essential extension to the IBM BPM offering. You can use it today with any V8.5.x version of IBM BPM, and with BPM on Cloud. So get it now so your BPM projects (and your BPM developers and users!) can benefit immediately.
We’re really fortunate to have such a vibrant ecosystem of partner solutions and services for IBM Smarter Process, and we expect IBM clients will benefit greatly from Salient Process’ SPARK Toolkits.
You can read more about the reseller offering and statement of direction in the IBM announcement letter here, “Selected enhanced support is now provided by IBM for the SPARK Toolkits, which are available from Salient Process, for IBM Business Process Manager“.
You can learn more about the SPARK Toolkits from the Salient Process website.
To learn more about other great solutions from our partner ecosystem, check out the Business Partner Applications Showcase – Smarter Process.