Simply put, Skelta technology will enable Invensys Operations Management and their global network of ecosystem partners to deliver new, easy-to-configure workflow, collaboration and application-development solutions that enable people, processes and systems to work together much more efficiently.

The Skelta management team believes that the Invensys brand capabilities and global reach is a great way to accelerate the growth of the company and improve service and capability to existing clients and new prospects. Together, by leveraging Invensys’ industry-leading solutions and delivery capabilities, along with the Invensys’ global network of ecosystem partners, we can provide our combined list of clients with additional software, services and solutions that can add differentiated value to their businesses. Skelta’s existing clients will be backed by a respected company with global delivery capabilities and a commitment to open technology, and Invensys will be able to deliver an impressive suite of BPM solutions to its global industrial customers.

Yes. There are no significant changes planned for Skelta’s existing operations. The Skelta operation will continue to be run by its existing management team. Invensys will preserve Skelta’s culture of innovation and will selectively integrate Skelta technologies with some of the Invensys technologies. The Skelta operation will continue to deliver BPM services to its global clients, but now the team will be able to leverage Invensys’ development and delivery capabilities, as well as our global operations, to pursue new clients. Invensys sees the Invensys-Skelta combination as a great way to grow the business by strengthening our technology, increasing our offerings and addressing additional client needs.

Yes. The Skelta brand name will become another flagship offering brand for Invensys and will continue to be utilized and promoted for the foreseeable future.

Invensys and the Skelta operations team remain committed to providing exceptional client service to our customers. Together with Invensys, the Skelta team will continue to specialize in BPM software, but the acquisition enables us to offer more products, services and solutions to the existing Skelta client base.

The strong Skelta management team is important to our growth and success, and together, we are committed to creating a seamless transition. Skelta leaders have the proven ability to deliver BPM software, services and solutions, and Invensys’ size and expertise will provide the Skelta operations team with the tools to pursue additional growth. Skelta chief executive officer, Sanjay Shah, is committed to remaining with Invensys, and he will be responsible for Skelta day-to-day operations.

It does not require any proprietary Skelta database. We have a database which is automatically created for every repository that is created inside Skelta. So essentially there are set of tables if you want to create in your own application database, you could run scripts & extend application database for that. We also provide scripts with which you can create additional tables.

Yes, this is possible with various levels of layouts

Columns to be displayed in Skelta list are configurable in List Designer.

For production environment we recommend using entity specific tables. The steps for mapping a list with tables are straight forward and simple. Entity specific table also help easy reporting, scalability.

A custom activity can be added as part of the workflow to generate pdf or word document. This is not available as out of the box feature.

Yes, versioning is available in the form of Major version (1, 2, and 3), Minor version (1.1, 1.2, 1.2.1). Workflow can be associated to a specific version.

Skelta allows security at process folder level, process level, workflow level & activity level. Application level, List level, list item level and within Process Designer in the activity property level. Same could be extended to BAM console.

Yes, the existing roles and infrastructure can be mapped to Skelta Security group.

Yes, extensive API's are available to manage security programmatically.

Skelta Process Designer provides web-based process modeling and deployment capabilities. The Visio like interface for Process Designer enables the process modeling, process designing and process execution elements to be defined on a collaborative platform. A business user models his processes using BPMN elements available within BPM.NET Process Designer and submits it to the developer to map the activities and automate the process.

Application level data can be passed as content, variable, XML, SOA (Skelta Object Access Layer) & as event data.

Yes, workflow templates are stored by exporting the Process definition in the XML format. These templates can be imported and published to reuse the processes /create other workflows.

Yes, Skelta BPM.NET supports versioning on the Process Definition.

Extensive security is available to restrict / grant rights to access Process Designer to modify an existing process and to republish. Options to restrict access to properties of activity level are also available.

Yes, all Human Workflow Services (HWS) activities like Invoke Forms, Approvals, and CheckList etc have options to send out time-bound alerts which can be configured. Escalations can be in the form of Task, email, SMS, Voice and custom code to implement custom business logic.

All the errors during runtime are handled by the engine. The same can be monitored using

• Activity Outputs: The-out-of-the-box Skelta activities come with outputs for handling most common exceptional situations like Resource Not Found, List Not Found and List Item not found. The same can be used at design stage to handle the exceptional situations
• Logger console: The messages are categorized based on the type of error. Log console displays, messages which are of type information, warnings and Exceptions. The same can be tracked to handle the errors
• As emails: Skelta is equipped with Notification services which are capable of sending emails on exceptions. The same needs to be configured using Skelta Farm Configuration Wizard
• BAM control: Categorized reports based on the status of the workflow allow the Administrator/s to resume or abort the workflows
• Event Viewer: All the exceptions and Warnings are added to the Event Viewers with complete details under, "Application" section
• Visual Studio: Use the standard Visual Studio debugging techniques for Custom code.

Yes, Skelta engine can retry executing activities on failure /error. The number of retries and the frequency is configurable in Skelta Farm Configuration Wizard.

Some of the reports which Skelta BPM.NET has are process related reports, Reports on workflow instances, activity details and transaction based reports. Reports could be data based or graphical.

Skelta list infrastructure uses Database such as SQL Server and Oracle. We can use any standard reporting tools to generate the reports.

Yes, Key Performance Indicators can be configured for a process, and can be used to analyze the workflow or application. To set up KPI's select the "BAM Configuration" option from the Settings menu in Process Designer. We have the option to configure the KPI, alerts and get alerts in the form of workflow, email etc.

Skelta BPM.NET provides extensive API's to build and customize reports. These APIs could be utilized to build / customize reports.

Skelta BAM Control has out-of-the-box reports for viewing workflows in, "Executing State, Aborted State, Completed State, Finished State and also Finished with Errors state".

Yes, the Process Execution View Report of the BAM control has the option to resume the workflows which are in Finished with Errors state.

Yes, Skelta BAM Control is equipped with Security features which enable the Administrator/s to configure the security access specific to any reports based on users / roles.

Skelta BPM.NET stores information in SQL or Oracle database.

All the workflow execution and the activity data are stored in the database and we can use the standard database maintenance procedure.

The centralized location in the form of "Enterprise Console" enables the administrator to monitor all workflow related activities under a specific application such as viewing reports, workflow associations, security configuration etc.

Yes, Skelta BPM.NET has extensive API's to access the administration functionality.

Yes.

All the workflow executions and their details are stored in the database. The status of the workflow can be obtained by using Skelta provided API's or by querying the tables.

Skelta BPM.NET provides extensive APIs which facilitates the interaction with process data i.e. the data which is part of the workflow and also for accessing Skelta List infrastructure.

Yes.

Yes, the workflows can be initiated, switched to sleep mode and re-initiated through an API. The status engine shall provide the status of all the workflow executing.

Yes, it is possible to act on an assigned task using APIs. By providing relevant data, it is possible to retrieve the entire information related to any activity context in Skelta BPM.NET.

Yes, Skelta BPM.NET supports themes that allow the user to change the look and feel of the user interface. You can also build your own themes.

Yes, the UI Culture for the application must be changed according to the preferred language. Locales folder with default locale "en-US" is stored during BPM.NET installation.

All Skelta controls are 100% embeddable and web-based. Out-of-the-box server controls available in Skelta BPM.NET can either be dragged and dropped from the visual studio toolbox or instantiated to be loaded to a web control container in the application. Following are the out-of-the-box Skelta Server Controls

• Process Designer Controls
• Workitem list controls
• Calendar controls
• BAM controls
• Queue controls
• List controls
• Workflow executing report controls

The Integration layer acts as an interface between Skelta BPM.NET and third-party applications. The various objects within the Integration layer include:

• Entity Infrastructure
  Entity Infrastructure is used to manage users across different platForms. An Entity has two categories-User Entity and Role Entity. A User Entity manages all the information for the users across different data sources. A Datasource can be an active directory, an SQL provider, SharePoint users or more. A Role entity manages users in roles.
• Web Services
  Skelta BPM.NET provides out-of-the-box activities that can be used to call a third-party Web Service from a workflow.
• Skelta Object Access
  This object allows reuse of third-party .NET objects in Skelta BPM.NET thus avoiding custom coding. Skelta BPM.NET allows registration of third-party object assemblies.

Yes, various information like the workflows designed, activities to be executed, different properties set for each activity etc., are stored in Skelta BPM.NET engine related tables.

Yes, Skelta BPM.NET controls are web server controls which can be dragged and dropped on to ASPX pages. These controls can be used in WinForms by loading the web pages in WinForms.

Skelta BPM.NET does not provide authentication, it has to be implemented in the application specific manner. The Web UI is provided in the form of Web Controls and can be easily incorporated with https.

Yes, Skelta BPM.NET provides API for accessing all human activity responses and outputs.

Yes.

• Custom Action
  All the activities implement the IActionRun interface. The assembly and the class name for these activities can be configured in the actions.xml file.
• SOA The ability to register .NET assemblies into the SOA list

The term concurrent workflows refers to the simultaneous processing of multiple instances of one or more workflows. The multiple processes may belong to the same workflow or to different workflows. The following example illustrates concurrent workflows.

Example:
ABC, Inc. has deployed two workflows - one for Employee Leave Management and the other for Expense Claims. The Employee Leave Management workflow commences with the submission of a leave request. Jack Smith, the companys accountant enters a leave request. While his leave request is being processed, he also submits an expense claim. Skelta BPM.NET is now processing two workflows concurrently.

Jacks leave application has been approved and his expense claim is awaiting the approval of his manager. Hence number of workflow instances is one. Jacks colleague, Mary now fills out her expense claim form. The number of concurrent workflows is two, even though Jack and Marys requests trigger the same workflow for Expense Claims.

The maximum number of concurrent workflows that Skelta will process depends on the product license. For instance, the Unlimited Server license of Skelta does not impose any restrictions on the number of concurrent workflows. However, for all types of licenses, there are no restrictions on the number of users or the number of process definitions that can be created.

If the number of instances of workflows being processed reaches the maximum number of concurrent workflows, and a user initiates a new workflow, Skelta will automatically send emails to the administrator and the user of that workflow informing them that it is unable to process the new request as the limit has been reached.

Please note that the workflows initiated when the maximum limit is reached are not queued. The administrator has to inform the user to re-initiate the process after the number of workflows has been brought under the allowed limit.