Business Process Management (BPM) software specialist Lombardi has unveiled a major update to its flagship Teamworks suite featuring enhanced workforce organisation and modelling capabilities and integration with Microsoft SharePoint 2007.

Jim Rudden, director of product marketing at Lombardi, said that the new organisation management module in Teamworks 6 had been designed to cope with the increasingly complex organisational structures found in many firms.

"There is a growing class of companies where traditional dotted line reporting relationships have been replaced with process-specific organisational charts that often overlap and create an organisational matrix," he observed. " In these matrix organisations people get work from multiple sources and traditional process management systems are not rich enough to model changes and optimise structures to ensure teams and individuals are not over or under worked."

He added that the new Teamworks for Organisation Management module had been designed to allow firms to model these matrix-based structures and also included "heat map" reporting functionality to help firms detect problems within their organisational structures and optimise business processes.

The new version of Teamworks also continues Lombardi's strategy of tightening integration with Microsoft, boasting a new module offering integration with SharePoint 2007. "We already support Office 2003 and the aim is to allow users to do process work from within the Microsoft environment," explained Rudden. " We'll also add support for Office 2007 in the back half of this year."

Separately, the new suite's underlying BPM functionality also features new collaboration tools to help process authors using the system communicate; pre-set key performance indicators (KPIs) and new functionality for setting service level agreements (SLAs) with simple "sentence-like" commands; AJAX and improved web services support; and tightened integration with Lombardi's new Blueprint on demand process management suite.

"You can now import and export processes between Teamworks 6 and Blueprint, and collaborate and chat between the two worlds," said Rudden. "So if the process developer executing the process in Teamworks has a question they can communicate and share results with the business manager working in the online Blueprint environment."

In related news, the new suite comes just days after IT management software specialist LANDesk also unveiled an updated version of its Process Manager product, featuring enhanced online workflow management and automation capabilities and tightened integration with Microsoft Active Directory and BMC's Remedy help desk software suite.