So how will Windows Workflow fit in with Metastorm BPM? The advantage of a BPM system is that an organisation is able to standardise on one particular technology for their BPM needs, but it seems quite likely that there will be areas for both technologies. In these situations, synchronising workflows between the two systems and getting data between the two systems is likely to be an important requirement. The Metastorm ECL Activity Library for WWF solves half of this problem as it offers a set of activities that enable hosted or third party activities to construct Workflows using Metastorm's ECL. Basically this means you can communicate from Windows Workflow to Metastorm BPM but not the other way. Hopefully the ability to communicate the other way will be added in some future release.

Several activities are provided by Metastorm, for example logging in; getting the user's To Do list; opening a folder; starting and submitting actions and raising flags. In practice it is likely that the most useful activities will be the ability to raise flags and start actions, which would be used to start a process or move a folder to another stage.

Two examples are provided. The first is a Windows Forms project which uses Windows Workflow to create a Metastorm BPM client, which doesn't seem like a particularly likely scenario but it does demonstrate how the activity library can be used. We couldn't get it to work fully, we were only able to view the lists but not open folders. We were also able to raise flags.

The second example is for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. To date we have been unable to get SharePoint to work in a virtual machine so we are not able to comment on this example.