BizTalk Rule Engine

51 of 184 | Rules engines and dependancy injection - a response to Nick Malik - Nick Malik published a thought-provoking article on rules engines recently.   You can read it at http://blogs.msdn.com/nickmalik/archive/2007/03/06/perhaps-it-is-time-to-declare-victory-in-the-battle-of-rules-engines-vs-dependency-injection.aspx.   He adopts a fairly negative attitude to rules engines in general, suggesting various reasons why he considers that they are not often useful.  His preferred route is to use dependency injection patterns, implementing rule logic in code components that are then loaded in some dynamic or configurable fashion into consuming applications.   I believe Nick is quite wrong to contrast rules engines and dependency injectio......

52 of 184 | Whitepaper: Rules Processing & BPM: An Architectural Perspective - Over the last few weeks, I've been working on a whitepaper which SolidSoft has published today on our web site.  It's been published to coincide with the Microsoft Architect Insight conference at Newport which started today.   SolidSoft is one of the event sponsors, and I spent the morning delivering a workshop looking, from an architectural perspective, on the use of rules engines in business process management.   It seems to me that while there is lots of guidance and information on rules processing in BPM for business stakeholders, and some for business and enterprise architects, there is far less material orientated towards solution architects.   I've ......

53 of 184 | Another sample from the rules team - Rules against XML - There's another new sample up, written by one of our testers Charlie. This sample shows how the WF Rules Engine can be used to process rules on Xml documents. This is something BizTalk BRE customers were able to do inside the Business Rules Composer, but is not obvious how to do with the WF Rules engine because of lack of first class tooling. However, since all the WF Rules Engine deals with is a .NET type, if you can convert your data as expose it to the engine as a type, you can easily accomplish the scenario. Get the sample here - http://wf.netfx3.com/files/folders/rules_samples/entry8981.aspx  ...

54 of 184 | Fully qualified name differs for XSD’s withmultiple root nodes in the Business Rules Engine - One of the most common problems that exist when using the business rules engine is forgetting to use the fully qualified name from a schema in definition of the rule.Posts like this on Google Groups can clarify what I mean if what I am talking about is not clear.I have discovered something new regarding the fully qualified name which caught me out this morning and I thought I’d mention it here in case you have the same problem. If you are using the fully qualified name of a schema with multiple root nodes in the BRE, the fully qualified name must include the name of the root node. When you go to your orchestration and try to feed a rules shape your XSD you will find it won’t recognize it (n......

55 of 184 | Mapping complex conditions in BizTalk with XSLT - Recently I found myself in a situation where I needed to evaluate a set of complex conditions that I could not use the Business Rules Engine for. The BizTalk mapper was able to achieve the conditionality by chaining a series of about 21 functoids together but this became very unmanageable especially since I was combining false statements to see if both were false, then returning a true to an “And” functoid (&) which evaluated another branch as true and passed a result to the node in the destination schema, you get the idea.An easier way is to plug in XSLT. There are disadvantages to doing this, the main one being its maintainability and transparency but when faced with the daunting set of f......

56 of 184 | Sample: Analyzing Objects of the Same Type in a Business Rule - In many scenarios, you will write a business rule against a type and expect the rule engine to separately analyze and act upon each instance of the type that is asserted into the engine. For example, if you write a rule against a .NET type and assert three .NET objects of that type into the rule engine working memory, the rule engine performs match-conflict resolution-action phases on each .NET object separately. In some scenarios, however, you will want to analyze multiple instances of a given type simultaneously in a rule. This sample demonstrates how to analyze multiple instances of a type in a business rule. (Download the attachment, and then go through the readme.doc first)...

57 of 184 | Sample: Deploying Business Rules Programmatically - The Rule Engine Deployment Wizard, which ships with BizTalk Server 2006, provides a graphical user interface to perform the following operations: ·     Import a policy from a Business Rule Language (BRL) file into the Rule Engine database, and publish the policy ·     Export a policy from the Rule Engine database to a BRL file ·     Deploy a published policy ·     Undeploy a deployed policy One of the disadvantages of this wizard is that you can perform only one operation at a time. For example, if you need to export two policies, you need to launch the wizard twice. This wizard is also not scriptable......

58 of 184 | Windows Workflow Foundation BRE Does Not Update Value Type Fields of a Structure - The Business Rules Engine of Windows Workflow Foundation does not appear to update value type fields that are part of a structure. When the THEN action of a rule is executed and a calculation updates a value type in a struct, the value of the structure member remains zero. Turning on tracing of the execution of individual business rules shows successful execution of the assignments, but the targeted field maintains its initial value of zero during its use in subsequent calculations. No exceptions are thrown and tipping the BRE via the "update()" command has no impact on this behavior. In my case, changing the struct to a class cured the BRE of this ailment.     ...

59 of 184 | Loading Java libraries into Oracle JVM. Or Calling JAVA routines - Dear All,<br><br>We have a requirement to call the JAVA methods from oracle stored procedures, to invoke the JBOSS rules engine from Oracle SQL ...

60 of 184 | Comparing the WF Rules Engine to the BizTalk Business Rules Engine - Stephen Kaufman is a Principal Consultant in MCS (Microsoft Consulting Services) who works with customers on BizTalk, WF and Rules A common question we get is how the WF Rules Engine relates to the BizTalk Business Rules Engine. With input from the rules team, Stephen has put together this excellent presentation comparing the WF Rules Engine to the BizTalk Rules Engine here: http://mnbiztalk.com/Presentations/TwinCitiesBizTalkUserGrup%20-%20Rule%20Engines.ppt -Kavita  ...

61 of 184 | Hosting WF Workflow Designer in a Web Application - The WF workflow designer is a very powerful tool for developers and non-developers who want to design workflow solutions. There is a desire in the community to host workflow designer in web applications and questions on how to achieve this keep on coming up. Ghenadie Plingau and I decided to write up a background and information regarding the task of hosting workflow designer in web application. We hope you find this useful. The main reason why it is hard to host workflow designer in a web application is CLR Code Access Security.  Workflow designer uses reflection and needs full trust permission set to execute.  There are multiple ways to implement workflow authori......

62 of 184 | Authoring rules against a collection - Sometimes you want to write rules against all items in a collection. In WF V1, this is not supported natively but can be achieved in the following manner: (you can come up with other ways too, but the essential idea is you want to simulate looping using forward chaining in rules) Rule 1 (Highest priority rule; Priority = 2) IF true THEN index = 0 Rule 2 (Next higher priority rule; Priority = 1) IF index > myCollection.Length THEN Halt Rule 3 (Lowest priority rule; Priority = 0) IF myCollection[index].... (do whatever you want with that element) THEN (whatever action you want); index = index + 1 So, the way rule execution proceeds is that the highest priority rule (Ru......

63 of 184 | Twin Cites BizTalk User Group Meeting - November 16th, 2006 - If you are in Minneapolis on Thursday November 16th please join us for the next Twin Cities BizTalk User Group Meeting. The meeting takes place at the Microsoft office in Bloomington from 6:00 to 7:30 I will be presenting on Business Rule Engines: Windows Workflow Rules vs. BizTalk Rules...

64 of 184 | Using the WF rules to iterate over a collection - I thought I understood how the WF Rules iterated over a collection.  Isn't that always how it goes - you really prove it to yourself when you can explain it to someone else.  Well, I started to explain how I thought it worked and this person started asking questions and I soon realized that I was no longer sure I understood it.  After a bit of research and with my newly obtained understanding I tried to explain it again and it actually made sense. So, I have decided to blog about this since I am sure that others will most likely need to do this and may even need to explain it to someone else. During my research I found the MSDN article titled Introduction to the Windows Wo......

65 of 184 | Business Rules Forums - I am writing from the Business Rules Forums in Washington DC. I attended a couple of sessions yesterday and have a couple lined up for today and the next couple of days. We met folks from various organizations and consultancy firms like ILOG, RuleBurst, LibRT, Boca, InScope and others. It is great to see how enthusiastic people are about business rules. It was also great to explain Microsoft’s BizTalk BRE and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) Rules Engine offerings to various customers and ISVs. If you’re around and want to talk about WF Rules and/or BizTalk BRE send me a note via the blog here....

66 of 184 | Wikipedia article on Rete - While I'm on the subject of rules engines (which seem to be my main blogging topic currently), I should report that during the last two or three weeks, I took the plunge and expanded (rather a lot) the Wikipedia article of the Rete algorithm.   See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rete_algorithm.     Originally, I used the text of an explanation I wrote a year or so ago.   I got some kickback on that, with claims of inaccuracy and other claims that the text was too convoluted (what, me write convoluted content - impossible!).   The original text wasn't inaccurate, but it was less comprehensive than it should have been, and lacking clarity in pla......

67 of 184 | BizTalk 2004 SP2 - BRE (Business Rule Engine) Fixes - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/905290/ Fix 245451: BRE caches XML fields incorrectly    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/905571/ Fix: 245450: The Rule Engine is not honoring rule priorities correctly in high load   http://support.microsoft.com/kb/920136/ FIX: Some Business Rule Engine values in the Windows registry are reset to the default values in BizTalk Server 2004   For all the bugs fixed in BTS 2004 SP2, see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/924330/  ...

68 of 184 | Blog from the MSFT Rules Team - From the owners of both the BizTalk and Workflow Foundation rules engines: http://blogs.msdn.com/rulesteam/ ...

69 of 184 | Blog from the MSFT Rules Team - From the owners of both the BizTalk and Workflow Foundation rules engines: http://blogs.msdn.com/rulesteam/ ...

70 of 184 | Professional BizTalk Server 2006 Update - I thought those of you that still read this rather poorly-updated blog might be interested in the current state of play with my BizTalk Book!  It's been taking every spare moment of my life hence the blog has had to take a back-seat, plus I need some content for the book :-) The end is in sight with all chapters due to be submitted to the publisher by the middle of November and it shaping up to be better then I ever imagined!  There's still some hard work required in the coming weeks though. As you already know I brought Kevin Smith on-board a few months back and he's just submitted his draft of the Testing chapter, it covers some fantstic content you won't find anywhere else, i......

71 of 184 | Managing BizTalk Business Rule Solutions With RuleBurst - While I'm a big fan of the Microsoft Business Rules Engine (BRE), our ruleset design and management story isn't as robust as many other solutions in this space. This is where ISVs like RuleBurst can now step in and fill the gap. Here I walk through the RuleBurst suite by demonstrating the solution I built for the SOA and BPM Conference last week in Redmond. I am FAR from an expert with the software, but at this point, I know enough to be dangerous. So what is the BRE missing that RuleBurst provides? Let's start with an easy to use management interface where I can see the various rule "projects." The main management interface, called RuleBurst Studio is shown below. One of the first th......

72 of 184 | From the Horse's Mouth - Don McCrady now has a blog. He's the development lead for Windows Workflow Foundation's rules engine. ...

73 of 184 | From the Horse's Mouth - Don McCrady now has a blog. He's the development lead for Windows Workflow Foundation's rules engine. ...

74 of 184 | Windows Workflow Rules From Outside A Workflow, And Other Conference Demos - Had a great time presenting at the SOA and Business Process Conference and wanted to share some of the code bits that I demonstrated during my Developing and Maintaining Business Rule Solutions session. One thing I demonstrated was the ability to build business rules in Windows Workflow and execute those rules from either within the workflow, or completely stand-alone. The rules themselves are fairly simple ... So I can execute those rules by kicking off the workflow, you can find lots of examples of that. On the other hand I haven't seen a whole lot of code showing how to execute these rules outside the workflow confines. In this code snippet below, I make use of the .rules file tha......

75 of 184 | Hello - My name is Kavita Kamani and I am a Program Manager on the Rules team. My focus for the next few months will primarily be on the core rules engine model and enhancements to it, along with parity with BRE. I have my own blog where I started posting on Rules before we set up this team blog, and I'll continue to use both spaces. I will cross-link any Rules related posts here. The set of blog posts I have in mind are a series of posts to help someone new to WF and Rules get acquainted well with the technology.To that end or otherwise, if there are specific posts you'd like to see, please let me know by using the comments feature of this blog. - Kavita Kamani...

76 of 184 | Session at Upcoming SOA/Business Process/BizTalk Conference - Next week we've got the SOA and Business Process conference in Redmond, and I'm fortunate enough to be delivering a session. The talk, entitled "Developing and Maintaining Business Rule Solutions" will cover the Business Rules Engine, Windows Workflow Rules Engine, and a 3rd party solution from the nice folks at RuleBurst. I've got something like 7 demos planned, including an application showing dynamic policy updates, rule security, custom rule tracking interceptors and more. Should be fun. If you're attending, stop by and say hi. Or just heckle me from the back, whatever works for you. Technorati Tags: BizTalk ...

77 of 184 | Session at Upcoming SOA/Business Process/BizTalk Conference - Next week we've got the SOA and Business Process conference in Redmond, and I'm fortunate enough to be delivering a session. The talk, entitled "Developing and Maintaining Business Rule Solutions" will cover the Business Rules Engine, Windows Workflow Rules Engine, and a 3rd party solution from the nice folks at RuleBurst. I've got something like 7 demos planned, including an application showing dynamic policy updates, rule security, custom rule tracking interceptors and more. Should be fun. If you're attending, stop by and say hi. Or just heckle me from the back, whatever works for you. Technorati Tags: BizTalk ...

78 of 184 | The Crucial "Gotcha" of the Business Rule Engine - I always remember that there's a big "gotcha" for using the Business Rule Engine (BRE) within BizTalk, but I always forget what it is -- until it gets me. Most of the time, we're passing a message, a.k.a. an XML document, into the BRE. It's quite handy that we can reference the same .XSD schema created in BizTalk when setting up our BRE vocabulary. Just remember this when you create a vocabulary element: The document type must be set to the fully qualified document type (for example, MyProject.MyMessage). The default is the schema file name with no extension. ...which generally means that the default is the document name/type in your BizTalk project, but without the project qualifier......

79 of 184 | Cheap Tricks with the Business Rule Engine - The "immutable" nature of Policies and Vocabularies tends to clash with the development cycle of design-develop-test-debug.First, from a webcast from Microsoft plus some of my own tweaking, here's the SQL to toggle the Published status of a PolicyUPDATE re_ruleset SET nStatus = nStatus ^ 1 WHERE strName = 'policyName'AND nMajor = majorVersionNumber AND nMinor = minorVersionNumberThe same for toggling a Vocabulary:UPDATE re_vocabulary SET nStatus = nStatus ^ 1 WHERE strName = 'vocabularyName 'AND nMajor = majorVersionNumber AND nMinor = minorVersionNumberThe last trick is to note how Import and Export work. You can Export a Policy (or Vocabulary), but if you try to Import it......

80 of 184 | BRE: Performance Consideration - Documentation in Development - Performance Considerations Introduction This topic discusses how the rule engine performs in various scenarios and with different values for the configuration/tuning parameters. Fact Types The rule engine takes less time to access .NET facts compared the time it takes to access the XML and database facts. If you have a choice of using either .NET or XML or database fact in a policy, you should consider using .NET facts for higher performance. Data Table vs. Data Connection When the size of the data set is small (< 10 or so), the TypedDataTable binding performs better than the DataConnection binding. Where as, the DataConnection binding performs better than the TypedDataTable bind......

81 of 184 | Tracking Rules Execution in Windows Workflow - In my previous blog entry on Tracking and the TrackingExtract functionality I talked about the ability to track the rules that fired.  As part of this functionality I needed to capture the rules that fired as well as to capture an XML representation of the object state (this is where the TrackingExtract functionality came in) to the database so that reporting systems could look at the data.  When I first started researching to find out if this functionality existed I came across a great tracking sample on Moustafa Ahmed's blog.  This sample shows how you can use the standard tracking infrastructure to track the rules.  Unfortunately, the standard ......

82 of 184 | Tracking Rules Execution in Windows Workflow - In my previous blog entry on Tracking and the TrackingExtract functionality I talked about the ability to track the rules that fired.  As part of this functionality I needed to capture the rules that fired as well as to capture an XML representation of the object state (this is where the TrackingExtract functionality came in) to the database so that reporting systems could look at the data.  When I first started researching to find out if this functionality existed I came across a great tracking sample on Moustafa Ahmed's blog.  This sample shows how you can use the standard tracking infrastructure to track the rules.  Unfortunately, the standard ......

83 of 184 | MS BRE: Further Issues with XPath Selectors in the Microsoft Business Rules Engine - This article supplements an earlier article, posted a couple of weeks ago (http://geekswithblogs.net/cyoung/articles/90102.aspx), on issues concerning the use of XPaths to map between the hierarchical data structure of an XML document and the relational view of 'facts' in the Microsoft Business Rules Engine.   As I suggested in the introduction to that article, I have repeatedly been asked to troubleshoot MS BRE issues which turn out to be related to the use of XPaths.   Earlier this week, I received another request for help.   The symptoms and solution to the problem are worth recording because they provide greater insight into this topic. http://geekswithblo......

84 of 184 | Rete? -   It seems that every thing that is to be called a Rules Engine must claim to implement the Rete Algorithm.  Microsoft's BRE does, Oracle's new Business Rules product does, iLog does, and the list goes on.  Going against the tide, the Rules Engine in Windows Workflow Foundation (WF Rules) does not implement the Rete algorithm.  That is not to say that it won't in the future, but in the near term, it won't.   Why not?   Let me first give a simple practical reason.  WF Rules was developed on a short development cycle, so we just didn't have time to implement it, let alone test it.   There are plenty of resources out there that describe what the R......

85 of 184 | MS BRE: Two new posts - Using XPaths and handling Negation as Failure - I've published two Microsoft Business Rules Engine-related articles today (nothing like a long weekend in a hotel). Negation-as-Failure and the Microsoft Business Rules Enginehttp://geekswithblogs.net/cyoung/articles/90100.aspxNegation can be a surprisingly problematic issue in the world of rules.   This article looks at one type of negation, generally referred to  as ‘negation as failure’ (NaF), and discusses the implications for the Microsoft Business Rules Engine (MS BRE).   In summary, we shall see that MS BRE fails to provide direct support for this type of negation, and as a consequence, the Microsoft Business Rule Language (MS BRL) is l......

86 of 184 | Blogging on the Business Rule Engine (BRE) - Sreedhar, another Programmer Writer on our team, started blogging recently on the Business Rule Engine. Look for postings on updated information, basic and advanced feature discussions, and new walkthroughs! http://blogs.msdn.com/biztalkbre/...

87 of 184 | Changes to BRE from BTS 2004 to BTS 2006 - Here are some of the changes to BRE in BizTalk 2006.   Summary: Support for generic types and generic methods Support for nullable types 2 Accessing nested members of a class 4 Type Casting support 5 Invoking Static Members of a Class 6 Overriding registry key setting with application configuration file. GetDeploymentDriver method added to Configuration class Clear method added to the Policy class IFactRemover interface added. SqlTimeOut registry key added. Arithmetic and logical operators support double promotion.       Attachment: Word document with the following information Support for generic types and gen......

88 of 184 | BizTalk Server Business Rules Framework White Paper - The following white paper gives you a high level overview of Business Rule Engine (BRE): http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/biztalk/biztalk2004/planning/business-rules-framework-overview.mspx  ...

89 of 184 | Social Network Analysis of Ajax Books - Ever wonder just how much all of those Ajax books that have been published are actually being talked about and used? Well, the Pathfinder blog wondered the same thing, so they put together this analysis of some of the more popular Ajax books currently in print. I’ve done this sort of analysis a few times, first with Knowledge Management, then with Business Rules Engines. I felt it was about time to do it for Ajax books. The analysis takes the listing from Amazon, in the section of “customers who bought this book also bought…” surrounding the books and pull out how many of each are listed. Then they drop that data into Pajek and end up with these results poltted out to this structure......

90 of 184 | Introduction - Hello Everyone, My name is Sreedhar Pelluru and I am a Programmer Writer with BizTalk Server team here at Microsoft. I own the content for Business Rule Engine (BRE) at the time of this posting. The reason for creating this blog is to evangelize about BRE. You will also see postings from our BRE development team on this blog periodically. I am planning to blog on basic and advanced features of BRE and walkthroughs that use BRE features. Please feel free to send me any feedback on BRE content in BizTalk documentation or any posting on this site.   Thanks & Regards,Sreedhar Pelluru MCSD .NET, MCP (BizTalk 2006)...

91 of 184 | Appian puts polish into BPM - I look at four key elements when gauging the potential ROI and success of a BPM package: adaptability to existing platforms and applications, process insight and activity monitoring, usability, and the strength of the rules engine. On all counts, Appian Enterprise 5.1 fills the bill with its full-featured, people-centric, process-management suite....

92 of 184 | Custom Rule Expressions in WF: Sample - Just in from one of the original BRE developers and my favorite rules PM: This sample shows the definition and use of a custom expression in the Windows Workflow Foundation rules engine.  Custom expressions are used to model specific predicate types or functions and can be used directly in the rules object model and editors.  http://wf.netfx3.com/files/folders/rules_samples/entry4315.aspx ...

93 of 184 | Custom Rule Expressions in WF: Sample - Just in from one of the original BRE developers and my favorite rules PM: This sample shows the definition and use of a custom expression in the Windows Workflow Foundation rules engine.  Custom expressions are used to model specific predicate types or functions and can be used directly in the rules object model and editors.  http://wf.netfx3.com/files/folders/rules_samples/entry4315.aspx ...

94 of 184 | People Ready Process with BPM and BizTalk - "People-Ready Process Through Business Process Management (BPM)." That's our just-articulated vision for BPM using Microsoft technologies. We see BPM not as just a technology solution, but something Gartner calls a "management discipline." However, we're claiming that the Microsoft stack can get you through the four main phases of BPM (model/design --> develop/deploy --> manage/interact --> analyze/optimize). Now I'm not here to regurgitate a press release. What is this REALLY? This is NOT a product launch announcement with regards to BizTalk functionality. We're pretty much turning the spotlight on the ways to build flexible, dynamic processes using Microsoft software l......

95 of 184 | Tip/Trick: Custom formatting HTML in Visual Web Developer and Visual Studio 2005 -   Problem   You receive an HTML or ASP.NET page from another developer you work with whose html source formatting standards are different from your own (bad use of casing, inconsistent indenting, etc).   You want to quickly clean-up and format the HTML “the right way” – where “the right way” is naturally defined as own your personal preference (and naturally every developer thinks their preference is "right" <g>).   Solution   Visual Web Developer and Visual Studio 2005 include a rich HTML source formatting rules engine that enables you to configure exactly how you want HTML markup to look.   These HTML formatting rules are used by default when......

96 of 184 | BizTalk Blogging Year In Review - Just a bit over a year since I started BizTalk blogging, so I thought I'd take 5 minutes and review the posts of the last year (126!?!) and try to find some highlights. Most Searched For Post. It's a pretty close tie between my series on SQL Updategrams ( part 1, part 2) and an end- to-end walkthrough of a Single Sign On (SSO) scenario. Most Comments. - My post on passing "anything" through BizTalk seemed to spawn lots of chatter. Most Self-Educational Post. The posts I learned the most by writing include how to do BAM for looping processes, how to correlate untyped messages, and how to do an aggregation pattern on large batch files. ......

97 of 184 | Thoughts on Testing a candidate on the BRE-Exam Aid -1 - The Business Rule Engine. If you are a BizTalk enthusiasts, hobbyist, developer, architect, or  implementer, the BRE is definitely something that you are going to come across.  I'm not going to explain what the BRE is, there are many resources on the web, just google away for this topic. However, if you claim to know about the BRE, how does one test this knowledge? Naturally, one could sit down at a developer configured system, and you can say, "Build me a BizTalk app that uses the BRE, you have an hour to do so." This would test knowledge of implementation.  If the candidate performs the task, then we exclaim, they know BRE. But how do you put the literal simulation into ......

98 of 184 | European Business Rules Conference -- Day 2 - http://www.eurobizrules.org/   Net: Another dose of concrete data and experience at a well-run conference.   Memes: Office is the most widely used business rules tool (if not the best), complex business policies drive adoption (e.g., government compliance).   Michael Azoff (Butler Group), Realising the Potential of Business Rules Automation: Covered a wide range of trends, alternating between laudable goals and candidate feature lists. He repeated a now-oft citation to eBay's adoption of rules.   Tom Debevoise (Business Knowledge Architects), Open-Source Business Rules: A Cast Study: Covered three Java-centric open-source rules efforts: OpenRules, Drool......

99 of 184 | European Business Rules Conference -- Day 1 - Here's a synopsis of my first day at the conference (http://www.eurobizrules.org/). Net: with about 75 in attendance, it's a cozy gathering of the faithful, an excellent environment to get up close and personal with those who are inventing or using the latest in rules technology. I love it! Memes: rules add consistency to business decisions, distinct roles of business user and IT developer. Ron Ross (Business Rule Solutions), Business Rules - Getting to the Point of Knowledge: Emphasizing the need to help front-line knowledge workers, Mr. Ross encouraged the audience to adopt a rules approach even if they weren't ready to invest in a rules engine and even for rules that wouldn't be automate......

100 of 184 | European Business Rules Conference -- Day 2 - http://www.eurobizrules.org/ Net: Another dose of concrete data and experience at a well-run conference. Memes: Office is the most widely used business rules tool (if not the best), complex business policies drive adoption (e.g., government compliance). Michael Azoff (Butler Group), Realising the Potential of Business Rules Automation: Covered a wide range of trends, alternating between laudable goals and candidate feature lists. He repeated a now-oft citation to eBay's adoption of rules. Tom Debevoise (Business Knowledge Architects), Open-Source Business Rules: A Cast Study: Covered three Java-centric open-source rules efforts: OpenRules, Drools (now JBoss Rules), and his own OpenLexicon. ......