The corporate policies that govern your company have been extracted from your various internal computer applications and now exist as business rules. A business rule is simply a policy statement expressed in a way that can be interpreted by a computer system.

ILOG Rule Team Server for SharePoint lets you author, edit, organize, and search your business rules in a designated workspace where your team can work collaboratively to establish review and approval cycles for your RuleDocs. RuleDocs are XML documents created by your IT staff in ILOG Rule Studio for .NET, that contain one or several business rules.

RuleDocs are important documents within your company's business rule management system (BRMS), and as such are stored in a rule repository managed by Rule Team Server.

When you retrieve a RuleDoc from the rule repository, you can add new rules to it or edit the existing ones. You can do this either in the Rule Team Server workspace, or in the familiar Microsoft Office 2007 environment if you have ILOG Rule Solutions for Office installed on your system.

In either case, once you update the modified RuleDoc to the rule repository, your IT staff will test and deploy the changes to the end-user computer applications. This is represented in the following diagram: