Business Pilot Studio is the interface to the Business Pilot Server and workflow engine. It offers a simple yet powerful access to the workflows, web site content, web templates, user directories and private uploaded documents.

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From Business Pilot Studio, you can design and deploy your workflows into real working applications. You can edit online forms using a drag and drop editor, edit your web pages, edit database tables and create user directories to protect Web resources. Everything is controlled from within Business Pilot Studio, making it the only desktop application required for workflow designers. Thanks to it's plug-in architecture, Business Pilot Studio allows for ad-hoc modules that facilitate the construction of common workflows.

Note that only workflow designers and administrators need access to Business Pilot Studio. Workflow participants (ie. users who perform tasks as part of a business process) only need acces to email and a Web browser.

Business Pilot™ is centered around its powerful and easy to use workflow engine. Business Pilot™ lets you draw the business processes that control your business and publish them to a powerful workflow engine. It gathers data from online forms, sends emails, generates documents, stores and retrieves data from a database and even assigns tasks to your employees according to the processes you design. Business Pilot™ knows that time constraints are important in a process. It allows you to make sure employees complete their tasks on time, so that managers can concentrate on other business issues.

Business Pilot™ version 4.0 offers new workflow capabilities such as Adobe® FDF form population and Microsoft® Word documents Web publication. All web forms and web pages can be secured via the integrated custom directories you create from Business Pilot Studio™.

Workflows execute by following the business rules you define. Rules are defined visually by comparing the data currently flowing through the workflow. The illustration to the left shows a workflow rule as seen by the workflow designer using Business Pilot Studio™. Because all the rules are defined in plain English, they are always easy to understand. The business rules editor combined with the workflow data browser make creating rules as easy as point and click.

Business Pilot Studio lets you design web form using a drag and drop editor or import a web form built using any external tool. Forms can be automatically configured to trigger workflows that will capture the data entered and propagate it into the rest of that workflow. All forms can be automatically published to the Business Pilot server and accessible through a Web browser instantly.

Forms, like other web resources, can be protected from unauthorized access using Business Pilot user directories.

Business Pilot™ workflows are the core of the system. Workflows allow you to materialize all your business processes. Very often, business processes control how content is published to the web site. Business Pilot's™ integrated content management system allows your workflows to extract information from pages in your web site, and insert information into the site. This task is done by searching and replacing tags you define while designing your page.

The workflow shown as an example above illustrates a simple web content publishing workflow. An authenticated user submits the text for a news article on the web site. The article is submitted to a manager for approval. Once approved, the workflow continues and the article is published on the web site automatically. The change is immediately available online and a confirmation email is sent out to confirm that everything went well.

This web site is entirely managed by Business Pilot™ and its powerful web content management engine.

The Business Pilot repository contains a Web Site section that can be automatically deployed to a Web server, making all of its content available through a web browsers. The built-in Web template technology relieves the designer from having to worry about the generic look and feel of the web site. Templates can be applied to web pages in order to decorate their content with the look of the web site.

Web pages, images, and other resources can be uploaded from the local machine into the remote repository and deployed to the Web server. Business Pilot Studio contains an HTML editor to assist you in creating web pages. In addition, a wizard helps you import documents created with Microsoft® Word (including all the images it contains) and apply a web template to it to make it blend into the Web site.

Workflows have the capability to send email notifications, task notifications and emails to a mailing list. Mailing list recipients are extracted from a database so that it can be easily managed.

Making a workflow send an email is as easy as dropping an email step onto the drawing board and configuring the recipient, subject and message.

Workflows have the capability to query and update a database. By using the built-in query builder, workflow designers can make their workflows interact with databases without any knowledge of SQL.

A query condition.

A database update mapping DB fields with workflow data.

Business Pilot Supports database-driven user directories. Directories can be managed by workflows or by manipulating the database directly.

From Business Pilot Studio, administrators can create groups of users by creating a selection criteria. They can then protect online forms, web pages and web reports by selecting the group allowed to view a certain resource.

When trying to access a protected resource, users are presented with a login page and must authenticate before they can be allowed to view the resource. The identification token is valid for the duration of the browser session and future attempts to access the resource or any other resource with identical protection will perform the authentication automatically. If the browser is closed and re-opened or left idle for a few minutes, password authentication will be required again.

The Business Pilot Server is a fully compliant J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) application. It requires a J2EE application server to run. If you are using a hosted account, you do not need to run the server and all you need is Business Pilot Studio on your desktop computer. It has been tested on the open-source JBoss application server, which can be downloaded and installed for free.

In addition, the Business Pilot Server requires a JDBC enabled database. It has been tested using PostgreSQL 7.4 on Linux and Microsoft® SQL Server 2000 on Windows.