In a large business services enterprise there may be several lines of businesses that have swiftly changing business rules. Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) was designed to provide a way to implement business processes and rules without coding.
Before WF came out, I saw several lines of businesses at Aon using InRule for this purpose. Now, InRule has released InRule for Windows Workflow Foundation.
Here are the bullet points from their marketing page:
- An authoring environment that enables both developers and non-technical users to easily author, test, and maintain business rules the WF rules engine.
- Capabilities to extend the Windows Workflow Foundation rules engine, including decision tables and 90+ built in functions.
- A Rule Catalog to manage rule check-in/check-out, versioning, and permissions across systems.
I would encourage any enterprise with a strong Windows stack in some of their business unites to consider InRule as a rules engine standard.
They support WF alone and BizTalk Server, so it can scale with the size of a project. It has it's own version control system and deployment model. I can only hope it's better then Crystal XI. Regardless there will be work in that area to integrate rules deployment with your software releases.