I have written about Enterprise Mashups from Serena Software on this blog. Their Serena Mashup Composer is a visual design tool that allows business users to create mashups without coding. Then the mashup is hosted on a Serena Mashup Server. The Composer is free so you can experiment. Then you pay for the Server once your mashups are perfected. Serena opened the tools for Beta users in September and after 1400 companies took a test drive, the tools are now generally available as of December 3. They are also planning to provide the Serena Mashup Exchange in Q1 2008 so firms can share mashups and benefit from each other’s development. This is a nice example of co-invention and the potential for one mashup to inspire another.

I was very interested to learn that Serena is also releasing a collection of pre-packaged mashups for common business processes on December 18. These will also be free. Mashups are an interesting concept that are sometimes hard to explain to new audiences. I am always looking for concrete examples beyond the well-known integration of Craig’s List for apartments with Google Maps. Here is the initial set of Serena Business Mashups. I am including the complete set because they are good illustrations of what you can do with mashups. You can see that they are aligned with common work processes and facilitate connections. Hopefully, they will inspire others. Serena plans to release more pre-packaged ones in the near future. Mash on.

1. Employee Time Off Requests - routes vacation and other requests to the appropriate person for approval and subsequent system update (such as decrementing remaining PTO hours).

2. Employee Onboarding - orchestrates the activities of bringing a new hire on board, such as procuring a computer, updating HR systems, readying office space, etc.

3. Change Requests - works for any type of change approval, whether it be for requesting new office materials, change of address, or a request for modifying an IT system.

4. Travel Approval - includes a process for routing travel approval requests.

5. Hardware and Software Change Requests - manages the capture, triage and resolution process for change requests for a hardware or software system.

6. Issue & Defect Tracking - manages the capture, triage and resolution process for software or hardware issues (bugs).

7. Incident Management - includes a full-featured service-desk for capturing, routing and resolving incidents.

8. Incident Escalation - makes it possible to seamlessly escalate an incident from the Incident Management Mashup directly into an issue management process for resolution. The status of the incident is updated automatically the issue goes through the resolution process.

9. Salesforce.com Case Escalation - makes it possible for a case manager using Salesforce.com’s case management capabilities to escalate a support case to an engineering group with a single button click. The case manager is notified of the status of the issue as it goes through the resolution process.

10. Salesforce.com Sales Discount Approval - adds a full-featured sales discount approval process to Salesforce.com.

11. Salesforce.com Customer Record De-duplication - collects records from salesforce.com, identifies suspected duplicates, and automatically starts a resolution workflow process when a suspected duplicate is identified.

12. From Request to Test Management (with HP/Mercury Quality Center) - orchestrates activities between a request management process and HP/Mercury Quality Center, ensuring that changes made to a system are tested efficiently.

13. Agile (SCRUM) Project Management - helps organizations manage an agile (SCRUM) project process, including sprint planning, backlog management and velocity tracking.