Trying to build a business process modeller around the way employees communicate inside a company we had to take a good look at how they behaved and sent informations and tasks to each other.

Usually, company employees use e-mail to communicate important business information, take decisions and delegate responsibility. While this is very flexible, it is extremely hard for managers to keep track of all ongoing activities and anticipate possible issues.

We thought to tackle this problem and structure the way employees communicate right at the root of enterprise communication: the email client. This structure would be provided by templated workflows, that would recreate the already existent communication patterns.

With business processes tracking each message and task is also a problem that needs to be addresed, so managers can have a complete evidence of the work being done throughout the enterprise.

Last but not least, measuring each employees performance, the time it took certain processes to finish, how tasks and activities were distributed was also important, as people needed to make calculated decisions based on these analytical inputs.

We started building our product from the root of the problem: enterprise communication. And since enterprise communication is done mostly via email clients, we choose to develop over the Microsoft Outlook client.

The first piece of our solution consisted in an Outlook Add-in that would represent the endpoint of our software. It would allow employees to communicate tasks, start workflows and comment on problems that they encountered.

As we wanted to prepare a sound solution, that could scale without problems, the service endpoints were built on the Microsoft Azure platform.

The administration application was developed using the ASP.NET MVC framework and analytics were computed using Windows Azure Worker roles and made available both in the administration part and in the Outlook Add-in.