Hi Christy,

There are various ways of integrating rules or embedding them within applications these days. In the past these could be found in discreet code or used within stored procedures in databases to provide the complex business decisioning required. These methods are inflexible post-implementation and do not lend themselves to change.

Today it is preferred to harvest the rules out of the application, provide rules either as tightly coupled service/object to the application or loosely coupled through a web-service. Because rules are likely to change more often than a business process, this gives you the flexibility and agility to change the business rules without de-stabilising the application or processes and to make changes rapidly.

We have access to a very easy to discover and authoring tool for business rules and decisions and would like to be of assistance if you so wish. It is a fairy complex "idea" but we feel that we have stripped out the complexity and put these services within reach of any analysts, developers and business stakeholders. See www.altkon.com or www.qualiasystems.co.uk for more information.

Hope this helps

Nigel