Decision Intelligence Platform and SharePoint

OpenRules announced a new Release 10.5.0 that integrates its Decision Intelligence Platform with Microsoft SharePoint. This development came in response to our large corporate customers who already use SharePoint as their major collaboration and document management platform?to store, organize, share, and access information securely.

Why is this development important? For two reasons:

1)????? OpenRules users can utilize SharePoint to manage their Rule Repositories

2)????? SharePoint users can utilize OpenRules as a full-scale Decision Intelligence Platform.

In this article, I will explain both the benefits and how to integrate OpenRules and SharePoint.

1.????? SharePoint as OpenRules Rule Repository

Since its inception 21 years ago, OpenRules?has utilized the well-established spreadsheet concepts of workbooks, worksheets, and tables to build?enterprise-level rule repositories.? Such repositories are usually comprised of multiple Excel workbooks with various decision tables placed in different folders and sub-folders to maintain business logic distributed by logical categories. For many years OpenRules customers enjoyed the power and simplicity of commonly used MS Excel as a decision table editor. On top of the rule repositories, OpenRules provides a Graphical IDE that includes automatically built decision diagrams plus the Rule Debugger that allows business users to execute rules in one-by-one mode with a visual analysis of the execution results. ?

Until recently, OpenRules customers kept their Rule Repositories mainly in local (or remote) file systems. To maintain those repositories and to support collaborative rule management, our customers successfully apply standard tools for:

-????????? Version Control: standard version control systems such as Git;

-????????? Authorized Access: Excel built-in protection mechanisms and Windows admin groups.

The reliance on commonly used document management tools (instead of offering proprietary ones) made OpenRules very attractive for large and small customers.

And now, when OpenRules 10.5.0 works with decision models hosted directly in SharePoint, our customers receive a great alternative to local file systems. With Version Control, Authorized Access, and Team collaboration being built-in capabilities, the SharePoint platform becomes a natural destination for OpenRules-based rule repositories!

Benefits of SharePoint for OpenRules Users

Here are the valuable capabilities that SharePoint brings to the Decision Intelligence Platforms like OpenRules:

• Centralized Document Repository: SharePoint provides a single platform for storing and sharing documents across the organization. It allows employees from different departments, offices, or regions to access important documents securely.
• Version Control: Financial, insurance, and other institutions often deal with many versions of their critical documents. SharePoint's version control ensures employees are always working with the latest version, while older versions are preserved.
• Role-Based Access Control: Sensitive information like financial reports, client information, and decision-making policies can be restricted to authorized users only. SharePoint allows granular control over who can view, edit, or approve documents.
• Collaboration Tools: Different teams can collaborate on documents in real time using Microsoft Office integration (including Excel). MS Teams foster teamwork among different departments or locations.

Since Microsoft made SharePoint a part of Microsoft 365,?its popularity has grown dramatically for businesses of all sizes. Today SharePoint is widely used in large corporations, particularly in the financial and insurance sectors. Its integration with Microsoft 365 tools (Word, Excel, Teams, and Copilot), customizability, and security features make SharePoint especially valuable for these sectors, where compliance, efficiency, and secure data handling are critical.

At the same time, insurers and financial institutions are among the most popular customers of OpenRules. We already have a positive experience helping a very large corporation to successfully migrate its complex OpenRules-based rule repository to SharePoint. As this process has been streamlined, we expect more of our current and new customers to take advantage of OpenRules and SharePoint integration.

2.??? OpenRules as a Decision Intelligence Platform for SharePoint

SharePoint users enjoy its existing capabilities for collaboration, compliance, and efficiency in large corporations, where managing sensitive data, processes, and documents efficiently is paramount. However, until now they couldn’t build and maintain rule-based Operational Decision Services using a full-scale Decision Intelligence Platform. OpenRules Release 10.5.0 closes this gap.

Benefits of OpenRules for SharePoint Users

Here are the valuable capabilities that the OpenRules Decision Intelligence Platform brings to SharePoint:

• Decision Modeling Environment: OpenRules provides a decision modeling environment with proven records of being used by many large and small customers worldwide. It allows subject matter experts (business analysts) to work in concert with software developers developing, testing, and debugging complex decision models. SharePoint will be a storage platform for Rule Repositories and Test Repositories maintained with MS Excel and OpenRules Graphical IDE.
• Deploying Operational Decision Services: SharePoint-based decision models created and tested using OpenRules?can be naturally?deployed?as?containerized decision services using AWS Lambdas, MS Azure Functions, RESTful Web Services, Spark, Docker, and Kubernetes on any popular cloud framework.
• Using Machine Learning: OpenRules Rule Learner supports business rules discovery in historical data.
• Using Decision Optimization: OpenRules Rule Solver allows finding optimal decisions for complex optimization problems.
• Integration with Databases: OpenRules Rule DB allows decision models to communicate with relations databases.

The OpenRules-SharePoint integration is?well-positioned to support a hybrid use of GenAI (Copilot) and rules-based systems like OpenRules. Being reasonably priced?OpenRules becomes an affordable full-scale Decision Intelligence platform for SharePoint users. ??

3.????? How to Integrate OpenRules and SharePoint

To integrate OpenRules and SharePoint you need to configure a special OpenRules application on SharePoint and set up the proper runtime environment. We’ve already provided very detailed instructions for SharePoint administrators on how to do it. After that, SharePoint users may easily migrate their decision projects from local files to SharePoint.

The standard OpenRules installation with a free evaluation includes a sample project “VacationDaysSharePoint”. It simply moved Excel files from the local folder “VacationDays/rules” to SharePoint “Documents” and used the following properties in the configuration file “project.properties”:

model.file=https://openrules.sharepoint.com/sites/OpenRulesSamples/Shared%20Documents/VacationDays/rules/DecisionModel.xlsx

test.file=https://openrules.sharepoint.com/sites/OpenRulesSamples/Shared%20Documents/VacationDays/rules/Test.xlsx

You may use this project as a prototype for your OpenRules decision projects with a SharePoint-based rule repository. Contact [email protected] with any questions and we will be glad to assist.