I am a firm believer in getting the technology for decision management into the hands of those who might use it - I often feel that people just don’t understand what’s possible. The folks over at ILOG have been offering a 6 month JRules trial since last fall. This full version has everything but the right to go into production. Supporting it are forums and other communities with over 600 members and 1,500 posts in 400+ topics. Plenty of topics seem to have an active set of replies and ILOG staff seem pretty active. Since they launched the program in October 2007 they have had about 2,000 downloads and have some 1,800 people in the program at present. Now they have decided to add the .NET product to the program.

Just as with JRules, you can get a six-month free trial of ILOG Rules for .NET® 3.0. They have launched a .NET centric community to support it with quick start guide, online tutorials, recorded Webinars, blogs and interactive forums. They hope to get about 500 downloads by the end of the year.

ILOG Rules for .NET supports rule authoring directly from Office and deployment to SharePoint, Visual Studio integration, integration with Windows Workflow Foundation and BizTalk server. ILOG is in the Microsoft Business Process Alliance, the Visual Studio program and a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.

Both the Java and .NET communities are part of ILOG’s BRMS Resource Center.

If you have downloaded the JRules trial, used the forums or if you download the .NET trial, let me know what you think of this experiment in try-before-you-buy.