ILOG has announced its ILOG Rules for .NET 3.0, a tool that lets you edit and manage business rules in Microsoft Word and Excel through a new "Rules" tab in the Office 2007 toolbar or "ribbon". ILOG Rules for .NET 3.0 also provides support for Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Microsoft's unified programming model for building service-oriented (SOA) applications.
"IT departments need the right tools to fully leverage the benefits of SOA and composite applications to continue to bridge the gap between business and IT," said Burley Kawasaki, Director in the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft. "We expect the investments ILOG has made in its latest release of Rules for .NET, particularly its tight integration with WCF and the .NET Framework, will benefit Microsoft customers who are trying to promote cross-boundary collaboration leveraging BRMS and SOA on Microsoft platforms."
Debuting with this release, ILOG Rules for .NET 3.0 has a modular architecture similar to its sister product, ILOG JRules, for Java. These modules include a dedicated rule authoring environment for business users called "Rule Solutions for Office." Other features include:
- Portable Rule Editing Environment for Business users. Rule Solutions for Office and Rule Team Server for SharePoint Services combined to promote a document-centric approach to rule management, leveraging new features in Office 2007. Users collaborate easily, taking rules where Word documents go -- disconnected, routed, attached, and printed.
- Out-of-the-box SOA deployment using Rule Execution Server for .NET. Traditionally, SOA investments have been expensive. However, ILOG Rules for .NET 3.0 lowers the costs of a typical SOA deployment by supporting "point-and-click" deployment, end-point management and standard approaches to project integration. Rule Execution Server for .NET leverages new features in .NET 3.0 including native support for WCF and scales with both vertical and horizontal deployment models.
- Enhanced Rule Management for Business Analysts. Business analysts can more easily collaborate with developers working on a common set of rules in their familiar environment.
- Enhanced performance with RetePlus and FastPath available for the first time on .NET Framework. In this version, ILOG is introducing RetePlus and sequential execution with FastPath for .NET platform. The combination of RetePlus and FastPath in ILOG Rules for .NET 3.0 eliminates the need for a customer to compromise when selecting an algorithm.
