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Business Rules Forum - so far

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I'm spending this week in DC at the Business Rules Forum Conference. It's been interesting.

First, before this I'd been to TechEd and PDC and those are obviously much bigger conferences - 10,000+ or 15,000+ people. This one, comparatively, is tiny - I think must be around 200 or so. The good thing is by the end of the conference, I might at least recognize the faces of most of the people who are here!

Second, this is probably the highest attendance from Microsoft - there's 3 of us here :) - myself, Moustafa and Jurgen who are also Rules PMs; typically 1 person has gone. The most common question I've got is - Does Microsoft have a Rules Engine? What is Microsoft doing in this space? Though Microsoft has not been a leader in the Rules space traditionally, we actually have two products: one - BRE, part of Biztalk 2004 and then in Biztalk 2006; and the other - WF rules, part of .Net Framework 3.0, which by the way shipped today. Anyway, people had heard of BRE, but there were a lot who had not heard of it. Most havent heard of WF Rules either. I think part of the reason is that out of the 200-odd people at this conference, there's very few IT folks and most are business folks, and I have to admit that we dont have a very business user friendly offering right now. The WF rules engine is part of the .Net Framework and geared towards developers, so the business people for sure haven't heard of it or used it. Some of the vendors have heard of it and have support for BRE rules and can generate rules that BRE can understand, and they talked about this in their presentations / demos.

It's been great talking to everyone about what we have and how Microsoft is approaching this space. We believe that by making the rules technology a part of the .Net Framework and hence the platform, we can make the rules technology more accessible and known to a broader audience of developers and ISVs who can build rules solutions and rules products on top of the Microsoft .Net platform. It should end up helping the entire rules industry because rules is still a niche technology that doesnt have a lot of reach.

The conference is half way through, and I am looking forward to the next two days to talk to more people and listen to some presentations.

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