BALTIMORE and LONDON, May 8 /PRNewswire/ -- Metastorm, a leading provider of Business Process Management (BPM) software for organizational agility, innovation, and governance, today announced the release of Version 7.5 of the Metastorm BPM(R) suite. The Metastorm BPM suite allows organizations to automate, manage and improve multiple business processes and supports rapid analysis and change across both human and system-based processes. With Metastorm BPM Version 7.5, Metastorm has built on its heritage of providing "business user friendly" BPM applications by delivering new features that focus entirely on enhancing the user experience.

"We have been both an end user and an implementer of Metastorm BPM for several years," stated David Holliday, CIO of AMTI. "We have always been impressed with the ease-of-use and the agility of Metastorm BPM as a platform for deploying, managing and maintaining enterprise processes. The new features in Version 7.5 will give us even greater capabilities to support collaborative work environments for our customers, including access to Metastorm BPM components within any portal framework."

Metastorm BPM Version 7.5 contains features designed to put BPM into the hands of business users and managers with a focus on three key benefits -- empowerment, productivity, and collaboration.

-- Empowerment. By putting more process management capability into the hands of business users, Metastorm BPM empowers workers to participate more actively in newly automated processes and to take advantage of access to new information to improve the way they do their jobs and to generate new innovative ideas. New empowerment features in Metastorm BPM 7.5 include: -- Easier access to external services for process design allows users to identify web service components that are of value to a process and easily tie those services into new process flows. In addition to empowering business users to take advantage of existing capabilities, it accelerates the business value gained from a service-oriented architecture. -- Enhancements to Metastorm Insight, Metastorm's full-featured process intelligence module, will allow users of all levels to access process information and business data, present it in ways that are meaningful to them, and empower them to analyze and improve processes and make more informed, effective decisions. Metastorm has released a new wizard-like user interface for Metastorm Insight that is designed to enable business users and managers to configure custom reports to analyze historical, point in time, or time-phased process data. -- Productivity. Increased productivity is often one of the first benefits organizations achieve as a result of deploying BPM technology. Metastorm continues to enhance its BPM Suite to enable even greater productivity gains among its customer base. New productivity features in Metastorm BPM 7.5 include: -- The Metastorm BPM for the 2007 Microsoft Office system client interface allows business users of all levels to participate in automated business processes without ever leaving their Office applications, including Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office Excel, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint. This puts business process management capabilities into the hands of even the highest-level executives, increases the productivity of all knowledge workers, and significantly lessens the change management challenges associated with deploying BPM technology. Users can now participate in processes and access process information without learning a new interface. This capability adds to Metastorm's existing Microsoft Office Outlook client, which as been updated to the 2007 version, and supplements Metastorm's robust web-based interface. -- Support for Windows Vista and Windows Workflow Foundation will enable broader deployment of Metastorm BPM, enhanced process performance, and faster awareness and response time for users using Windows Vista desktop gadgets. Metastorm's ability to use Windows Workflow Foundation workflows as an integral component of Metastorm BPM applications will also increase IT and developer productivity when deploying and maintaining processes and allow them to orchestrate multiple workflows using the embedded Windows Workflow Foundation designer. -- Collaboration. Most business processes involve multiple people, and organizations are always looking for ways to improve communications among business functions and foster team collaboration. With Metastorm BPM, collaboration on business processes is made easier with the following new features: -- Enhanced support for Metastorm BPM within Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and JSR-168 compliant portals will allow organizations to deploy Metastorm BPM processes within a standard enterprise portal environment. In addition to the library of web parts that Metastorm has traditionally provided for SharePoint, users can now model processes using the Windows Workflow Foundation Process Designer via Office SharePoint Server 2007 and also directly take advantage of SharePoint Content Services. These new features will enable greater collaboration on process design and process data. In addition, Metastorm BPM can now be deployed within any JSR-168 portal application, including SAP Portal and Vignette. These portal additions to the Metastorm BPM Suite provide a rich environment to foster teamwork, information sharing, and collaborative process design and execution across the enterprise. -- Sharing of services via external repositories and business catalogs in Metastorm BPM 7.5 will allow users to access available web services from any repository or web service catalog and incorporate them into Metastorm BPM processes during both design and run-time. In addition, Metastorm enables the ability to expose Metastorm-built process components as web services and publish and share them within any external repository or business catalog. The sharing of process components and business functions across organizations is the ultimate form of collaboration and will result in even greater process efficiency and agility within the enterprise as well as among trading partners. In this way, Metastorm BPM becomes a valuable platform for collaborative process analysis and improvement.

The Metastorm BPM Suite is unique in its ability to support the automation, analysis and improvement of both human-centric and integration- centric processes on an enterprise scale. By harnessing the power of these automated processes and associated information into a form that is easily accessible by business users and managers of all levels, an organization can truly initiate transformation.

"In any organization, it is ultimately the people that determine success," said Burley Kawasaki, director of product management in the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft Corp. "The latest release of Metastorm BPM capitalizes on the strengths of Microsoft's user-facing technologies, including the 2007 Office system, Windows Vista, Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the Windows Workflow Foundation framework, to empower people to do more and generate innovative ideas. Metastorm is utilizing its position in the Microsoft Business Process Alliance and strong alignment with BizTalk Server to accelerate the release of new capabilities that truly enable people-ready processes."

"Metastorm has always focused its development efforts on areas that provide the greatest business value to our customers, and we have continued that track record with Metastorm BPM Version 7.5," stated Greg Carter, CTO and vice president of development for Metastorm. "By putting business process management into the hands of the business users through an interface they know and use everyday via the 2007 Microsoft Office system, and opening up new avenues for collaboration and sharing via web services catalogs and portals, Metastorm BPM Version 7.5 empowers business users to be more productive and to generate innovative ideas for business transformation and strategic advantage."

About Metastorm, Inc.

With a focus on improving processes for greater innovation, agility, and governance, Metastorm leads the market in business process management (BPM) software and best practice methodologies for human and system-based processes. Going beyond the basics of modeling and automation, the Metastorm BPM(R) Suite supports the complete process lifecycle and is designed specifically to address complex processes that are unique to organizations. Metastorm's 1300+ global client base in manufacturing, retail, financial services, business services, healthcare and government are achieving rapid ROI and Enterprise Process Advantage(R) in customer service, supply chain operations, risk management, and internal operations. For more information visit http://www.metastorm.com/.

CONTACT: Gina Karr of Metastorm, Inc., +1-443-874-1260,
gkarr@metastorm.com; Jason Gedeik of Merritt Group, +1-703-390-1534,
gedeik@merrittgrp.com, for Metastorm, Inc.; or Amy Redhead of Strategic Public
Relations, +44 1494 434 434, amyr@strategicpr.net, for Metastorm, Inc.

Web site: http://www.metastorm.com/