Earlier this year, when I met with IBM Lotus general manager Al Zollar, he talked about how collaboration is not an application. Instead, Zollar said, collaboration is a feature and that the future for Lotus Notes would be in its ability to export its collaborative features into other applications.

I had a tough time picturing how this might work. The implication was that some piece of collaborative functionality could be componentized, and made available to the host application.

Now, after meeting with Nobilis Software's David Meiselman, I have a better idea of what Zollar was talking about. Nobilis' technology provides similar capabilities, but instead of making collaborative functionality available to the host application, it enables the host to follow business process and workflow. For example, if a document such as an expense report or a press release must follow a predetermined process before it's approved, Nobilis' technology can process-enable the applications that create those documents. This way, the workflow capabilities become a part of the application, rather than the alternative, where users must first create a document in one environment (like a spreadsheet) and then manually initiate a business process through the use of another environment (like e-mail).

Until September, Nobilis' technology was available only in an industrial-strength version that cost $15,000 to $20,000 and required a separate Java 2 Enterprise Edition-based (J2EE) application server.

But according to Meiselman, marketing vice president at Nobilis, some of the company's clients were using its platform to turn ordinary desktop applications like Microsoft Excel into business-process-capable software. For example, cells, ranges, or entire spreadsheets could be incorporated into a business process in such a way that allowed data to be imported to -- or exported from -- a spreadsheet at specific moments during a particular workflow. For example, an expense report approval or escalation of business intelligence that exceeds or falls short of certain performance thresholds could be moved automatically through the established workflow process.

Nobilis decided to make it easier for smaller workgroups to build ad-hoc business processes using Excel. Here at Comdex Fall 2002 in Las Vegas, Nobilis is demonstrating a scaled-down version of its enterprise-class business process management software called Nobilis Ci. Unlike Nobilis Enterprise, which depends on a full-blown J2EE application server, Nobilis Ci uses the JBOSS Java Virtual Machine, which has a significantly smaller footprint that enables it to run on a desktop system.

Nobilis Ci, which costs $399 and can support a workgroup of up to 10 people, also includes a technology called Process Writer that, Meiselman says, is analogous to the report writing technology found in OLAP and business intelligence tools. The business process authoring tool is built right into Excel. Without ever leaving the context of the spreadsheet environment, an Excel user can author and publish a business process. Processes can be changed later. Should a company ever decide to upgrade to Nobilis Enterprise, the same processes will run without modification.

To some extent, Nobilis' architecture is fulfilling what has long been advertised as a promise of Web services. Nobilis enables applications as simple as a spreadsheet to pass parameters to, and invoke a process on, another system.

Recently, Microsoft has been talking about technologies such as XDocs that are designed to accomplish the same sort of connection between desktop applications and back-end processes. But Meiselman wasn't fazed when I asked him if Microsoft's inclusion of its competing technologies could hurt Nobilis Ci's chances of success. One reason is that, again, in Web services-like fashion, the supporting business process code resides in Enterprise Java Beans rather than in Windows code-based applications. This offers a degree of differentiation that, Meiselman says, will appeal to companies already entrenched in both Microsoft Office and Java-based application servers.

Nobilis Ci has address book functionality, too; it can use existing messaging engines such as Microsoft Exchange Server to route documents through the business process. When users at any stage in a process open the spreadsheet and change or enter data, pressing something as simple as a submit button embedded in the spreadsheet can automatically advance the spreadsheet to the next step in the process. For enterprise class installations, Nobilis Enterprise can work off an LDAP directory.

Nobilis Software of Boston can be reached at 617-556-8288.

Could Nobilis make life easier for your workgroups? TalkBack below or e-mail David at david.berlind@cnet.com.