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OpenText MBPM

Score7.2 out of 10

16 Reviews and Ratings

What is OpenText MBPM?

OpenText acquired BPM solution Metastorm in 2011, and has rebranded the product as OpenText MBPM. It is an alternative BPM solution to OpenText's primary BPM offering called OpenText Cordys Business Process Management.

Top Performing Features

  • Standard reports

    The software offers pre-built reports with metrics standard to the category.

    Category average: 8.3

  • Business rules engine

    Business rules engine allows non developers to change business logic in a model

    Category average: 8

  • Process designer

    Web-based tool for creating and customizing web process models

    Category average: 8.5

Areas for Improvement

  • Content management

    Content management tool for storing and managing versioning of electronic documents, images, etc.

    Category average: 7.8

  • SOA support

    Support for reusable services to be built into process design

    Category average: 7.6

  • Custom reports

    Users can create custom reports.

    Category average: 7.9

Powerful, easy to use with a few limitations

Pros

  • Complex routing of tasks based on calculated criteria
  • Linking between tasks and accessing relevant information
  • Organising, scheduling and prioritising
  • Different views for different people

Cons

  • The integration with Office.
  • Reporting - the functionality is quite limited. Of course, we can use SSRS on the database but better-embedded reporting would be good.
  • Using the eRaiseFlag functionality (getting one folder or workflow to influence another) can be slow on a busy system.

Return on Investment

  • The development of the ticketing system has enabled us to greatly improve customer relationships
  • The scheduling and allocation of the tasks has reduced both the number of open tickets and the turnaround time to resolution
  • Management information from the system has improved decision making

Alternatives Considered

Datapolis Process System, ARIS Business Process Management (BPM), Agiloft Custom Workflow/BPM and WorkflowMax

Other Software Used

Visual Studio IDE, Microsoft SQL Server

Rapid Process Management

Pros

  • Diagnoses and highlights errors and inconsistencies for correction based on BPMN standards.
  • Support different views of the process from Swimlane perspective, system interactions, process to process dependency, process to attributes, process to rules.
  • Able to publish processes per custom defined templates or formats on the fly.
  • Changes to a common element are automatically made to every use of that element on all diagrams (insert, update, delete).

Cons

  • Be able to perform a Google type search as a user type name in text field.
  • Auto creation of next activities in model viewer to quickly generate happy path scenario.
  • Community Collaboration - Support of external process participants (ex: business partners) that have limited or no IT infrastructure, social process communities such as Salesforce.

Return on Investment

  • Positive: Able to provide scalability from capabilities to processes and applications for each business domains that allowed decommission of legacy unused applications and to eliminate waste and overhead cost.

Other Software Used

Oracle BPM Suite, Signavio Process Editor, IBM Business Process Manager

Usability

OpenText MBPM - a rapid development wonder

Pros

  • Integration into third party applications
  • Rapid Development; allows developers to quickly build and/or change workflows
  • Powerful user interface design
  • High degree of scalability

Cons

  • Lack of a graphical user interface email editor
  • Auto creation of later activities in model viewer would be nice in order to quickly generate outcome scenarios
  • Built-in reporting is somewhat limited

Return on Investment

  • Easy and convenient access to client configuration information
  • It provides numerous built-in controls which are quite useful during rapid development cycles
  • It also provides a tremendously rich .NET framework which can be used to tweak the experience to the needs of each individual customer

Other Software Used

IBM Analytics Engine, FileHold, TransactionGuard

A software developer's view on Metastorm

Pros

  • Rapid Development: Metastorm is designed to allow developers to quickly build (or change) workflows. Business Logic, rules and regulations change quickly in today's world and being agile about software changes keeps users productive and engaged.
  • Customization: While Metastorm provides many pre-built controls useful during rapid development cycles, it also provides a rich .NET framework which can be used to customize the experience. This provides a nice balance between ease of development and detailed customization.
  • Flexibility: I've evaluated many workflow solutions, and most are restrictive in form design or branching options. Metastorm closely approaches a true state machine architecture allowing for complex workflows and rich user interfaces.

Cons

  • The Metastorm process engine is based on an older version of .NET. Updating to a newer version would resolve several known issues with .NET email functionality.
  • Metastorm builds web pages at run time. While the UI presented to the end user is fine, the Document Object Model is convoluted and subject to change with new releases. Providing a more simplified DOM or at very least a custom function to replace document.getElementById() would make client-side scripting a much more powerful tool.
  • One function that I've seen Metastorm competitors do well, is email wizards. Having a WYSIWYG email editor would be really nice.

Return on Investment

  • Metastorm has allowed us to evaluate new business much faster allowing us to move quickly when time matters.
  • We have used Metastorm to automate a number of complex and tedius tasks, freeing up our staff to do other important business.
  • Metastorm has allowed me to automate a number of administration functions, and share the software management responsibility with the users themselves.

Metastorm Review

Pros

  • Ability to customize workflows
  • Integration into third party applications
  • Ability to use both a GUI and code-based interface to create business processes

Cons

  • This is a difficult question to answer as I've only had experience with a dated version of Metastorm
  • The newest version may have features that remedy issues I have experienced with 7.5

Return on Investment

  • Reduction of paper usage for certain processes
  • Streamline some business processes