Singularity has, on October 4th, announced the launch of the latest version of their Business Process Management (BPM) and Case Management suite, TotalAgility v5.3. Peter Whibley, Product Marketing Manager for Singularity explained, "In v5.3 the TotalAgility product has extended its data handling capabilities allowing organisations to easily utilise fragmented data, extract value from it and put it to work for the benefit of the organisation. This version helps organisations reduce the cost and risks associated with process improvement activities by enabling the reuse of data models in related business areas, reducing data integration costs and eliminating the risk associated with the management of multiple data sources,"

The new capabilities include the following:

• Support for data virtualisation is provided through the use of virtual entities. This feature Singularity describes as allowing users to "link data and sync data" wherever it resides, delivering data independence from the process. The process can interact with data located in an external data source as if it was an entity defined as part of the process. Singularity see that providing virtualisation of data entities at the logical level inside the BPMS allows the same data models to be reused across multiple processes significantly reducing development and integration costs.
• Capability for attributes of an entity can be stored in an external database and data can be retrieved, updated, created and deleted via Data Access Service (DAS) or web service calls. A single view of a business object can be created regardless of where the actual data resides.
• Supports the concept of Just In Time (JIT) data where the data presented to the process is updated or reloaded once it is called by the process.

The definition and management of entities has been made even more intuitive. Additionally TotalAgility provides support for a visual representation of an entity and all related entities including embedded entities and entity lists.

Integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM has been extended by allowing the user to specify that particular attributes of an entity are stored in Dynamics CRM and configure methods to dynamically retrieve, update, create and delete those attributes and associated instances.

This new release by Singularity provides more versatility in terms of the support of different types of data and also tighter integration to The Microsoft Platform..