Introducing Rule Solutions for Office

Learn about Rule Solutions for Office and its main features for editing rules in Microsoft Office.

Rule Solutions for Office enables you to edit business rules in Microsoft Office documents called RuleDocs. You can update and share rules with RuleDocs, which can also provide supporting documentation and information such as the original policies for the rules.

Rule Solutions for Office works in conjunction with Decision Center, which serves as a workspace for business users to collaborate on authoring, editing, organizing, and searching for business rules.

Decision Center publishes action rules and ruleflows as Microsoft Word RuleDocs. Rule Solutions for Office editors integrated with Word let you edit the rules and ruleflows using a natural language syntax. These editors help you use correct business vocabulary and rule syntax through the Intellirule editor, which is also used in Decision Center.

Decision Center publishes rule decision tables to Microsoft Excel RuleDocs. The Rule Solutions for Office decision table editor in Excel enables you to view and edit sets of similar action rules. You can also use Excel commands to change table properties.

You use Rule Solutions for Office and RuleDocs to view, review and edit rules offline. You can also share RuleDocs by email or through a common server to collaborate on their contents with people inside or outside your organization.

You can also open a rule directly inside Decision Center to edit it in Rule Solutions for Office without publishing and synchronizing a RuleDoc. When a rule is checked out this way, Decision Center locks it to prevent modification conflicts. No one else can change the rule until it has been checked back in.

Rule Solutions for Office synchronizes the changes made to a RuleDoc back to the environment from which the RuleDoc was published. Even if you change the organization of RuleDocs in a folder or move rules from one RuleDoc to another, your RuleDocs still sync back to their source.

If synchronization is somehow blocked, however, you can use the RuleDoc Repair wizard to correct the problem. See RuleDoc Repair wizard.