One of the products Lotus has bought over the years and incorporated into their Lotus portfolio that always interested me was Lotus Workflow. I have a real admiration for this product that has been out there now for a over decade but still is more than versatile and resilient enough to be a strong competitor when it comes to workflow tools.Especially for Lotus Notes applications.

For years I’ve been fearing an End of Life announcement but I guess it keeps proving itself enough to keep on going. Last Lotusphere there was even a session in which some very nice integration with the sidebar and Xpages was shown and there is some discussion on the possible integration of Lotus Workflow into Quickr. A step that would benefit both products greatly and which I would really love personally. Let’s face it, the current out-of-the-box workflow capabilities in Quickr (I wouldn’t even call it that) are way too limited.

Recently IBM bought a company called Lombardi that also has a very good workflow/Business Process Modeling tool called Blueprint. I didn’t know about it but was attended to it and I must say it looks pretty neat. I’m muddling through some of the documentation and online tutorials to get an idea of the product right now. Ok, it doesn’t natively integrate with Lotus products (haven’t found any reference) but with all the new techniques of accessing data in Lotus databases that shouldn’t be to much of a problem.

The question of course is whether this tool isn’t also a good competitor for integration with Quickr and if so what happens to Lotus Workflow… We will have to see and wait I guess.