"On behalf of Larry Goldberg and myself, we are so thrilled with OpenRules-6 capability! It moves the business rules approach into the realm of decision management and up the organizational maturity level."   Barbara von Halle, KPI, co-author of "The Decision Model"

Release 6.0.1 is a major milestone in the OpenRules^® history. After 7 years of being widely used by real-world decision support applications, OpenRules^® 6 finally brings us closer to the ambitious promise of various business rules systems:

         “Return Control over Business Logic from IT back to Business Analysts!”

OpenRules^® 6 provides the following key differentiators:

• No rule languages to learn, no rule coding

• No proprietary graphical interfaces for rules management

• No IT involvement in business logic representation

• Executable Decisions.

OpenRules^® 6 effectively removes any programming from rules representation and allows business analysts themselves to specify their decisions and supporting decision tables directly in Excel.  Business users can define business glossaries and test cases as Excel tables, and then execute their decision models to validate their correctness. 

Once a decision has been tested, it can be easily incorporated into any Java or .NET environment. This process may involve IT specialists but only to integrate the business glossary with a specific business object model. Business logic remains the complete prerogative of subject matter experts! Click here to look at sample decision projects.

OpenRules^® 6 introduces new concepts and comes with the proper predefined types of Excel decision tables:

• Decision

• Decision Table (RuleFamily)

• Glossary

• DecisionObject.

These tables do not force a user to add any "Java snippets" or custom rule templates used in earlier versions of OpenRules^®. They allow a business user to create decisions with supporting decision tables. In particular,  it allows you to implement decision models in accordance with The Decision Model approach. At the same time, with OpenRules^® these decisions become executable without any additional coding! A business user can also add test cases using simple Excel-based Data tables  and execute decisions against these tests to compare actual and expected results.

OpenRules^® 6 comes with a set of new sample decision projects and new manuals:

• Installation Guide

• Getting Started

• Tutorial

The release 6.0.1 extends OpenRules^® decision tables with new predefined types of conditions and actions such as "If", "Then", "Conclusion", and "Message". It adds many improvements to the core OpenRules^® implementation: advanced rule templatization mechanism, enhanced Java snippet processing mechanism, an access to Excel data types from Java code, and more. This release also fixes several old, rarely occurred bugs especially in the algorithm that automatically differentiates between horizontal and vertical decision tables. With all these changes in place, OpenRules^® remains backward compatible.

OpenRules^® 6.0.1 is available for downloads now from www.openrules.com/download.htm. For a nominal fee you may download a complete version 6.0.1 accompanied by Priority Technical Support, Inside Track Program, the ORD^™, RulesSolver^™, and many different sample projects. You may also download a completely free evaluation version.

OpenRules team wants to thank Larry Goldberg and Barbara von Halle whose book "The Decision Model" inspired us to get rid off unnecessary coding inside OpenRules decision tables and provided business analysts worldwide with a practical decision management approach.