BPM & Workflow

[CDM]

Can you define BPM as opposed to workflow or Is BPM a system or a strategy that is comprised of a number of technologies?

[Mary BPM]

Business Process Management is a methodology for continuous business process improvement. This includes workflow, business process modeling, business process deployment on a run-time process server, business process monitoring, and business process optimization.

Workflow is one aspect of BPM. It is the operational aspect of a work procedure: how tasks are structured, who performs them, what their relative order is, how they are synchronized, how information flows to support the tasks and how tasks are being tracked. Generally, workflow is part of business process modeling work. A task is modeled by defining the workflow, or the step that need to be taken & the parties involved to execute a task.

BPM is not a single product, but a requirement of businesses to be able to understand what is affecting their performance (for example, people, processes, infrastructure, or assets), understand why it is having that effect, and take corrective action to achieve the desired business performance. A complete BPM solution is realized through a set of best practices, methods, and software built around a consistent and extensible architecture. IBM offers this type of comprehensive solution.

[rsoika]

Hi,

we are working on an open source workflow project to address the issues which concerns to the human based workflow tasks inside a bpm environment.
In our project we have three subprojects:
- workflow modeller (eclipse based)
- workflow server (jee implementation)
- workflow client (eclipse rcp)
our goal is to integrate simple human based add hoc workflows into larger bpm sytems like the Websphere Process Server.

Open Source Project: http://www.imixs.org

I would appreciate for any feedback

regards
ralph

[Mary BPM]

Hi Ralph,
This is an excellent approach to getting started.
Working with a modeler, process server & client should allow you to integrate simple human based workflows. This is the right way to go.
Please write in as you move forward to keep this group posted. We can try to assist you as you move along.
Working with the Open Source project will also help you stay in touch with developments in BPEL & BPMN to help you move forward.
Mary

[mjeynes]

Ralph,

to help with WebSphere interoperability now and ongoing, follow the current and developing standards we are driving at http://www.osoa.org

Also maintain a watch on WS-BPEL 2.0 and the value-add extensions such as extensions for sub-processes and BPEL4PEOPLE.

Mark

[ms1mm0]

Hello Ralph - I hope some of the information below will also help you understand how your opensource assets can link into WebSphere Process Server (WPS) and the standards WPS supports.

WPS integrates with many third part modelling and monitoring tools.

For modeling WPS uses WS-BPEL which is an open industry standard. Any 3rd party that provides modeling tools that conforms to WS-BPEL should be able to deploy to WPS.

For monitoring WPS uses Common Base Event (CBE) which is a WS-DM standard. Any 3rd party that providesmonitoring tools that use WS-DM should be able to take feeds from WPS.

In general WPS supports the following standards :

Support for Web services - SOAP/HTTP, SOAP/JMS, WSDL 1.1, WS-* Standards including WS-Security and WS-Atomic Transactions

Support for a variety of messaging protocols including JMS 1.1, WebSphere MQ, TCP/IP, SSL, HTTP(S), and multicast for optimum flexibility and improved asset reuse

Easy interoperability with WebSphere Family - WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere MQ, WebSphere Message Broker and WebSphere Event Broker

Extend your integration with a comprehensive set of client packages including messaging services for clients running in non-Java applications in C/C++ and Microsoft .NET environments. The Web services Client is a JAX-RPC-like Web services client for C++ that enables users to connect to Web services hosted on WebSphere from a C++ environment.

The business-process component in WebSphere Process Server uses a Web services-BPEL (WS-BPEL) technology-compliant process engine. WS-BPEL defines a model and a grammar for describing the behavior of a business process based on interactions between the processes.

WebSphere Process Server provides a business-state-machine component that you can use to model heavily event-driven business-process scenarios. These event-oriented scenarios are sometimes hard to model in a WS-BPEL model, but can be very easy to model in a state-machine diagram. The WebSphere Process Server state machine is designed to emulate Unified Modeling Language (UML) state-machine diagrams. The combination of WS-BPEL business processes with business-state machines gives you more business-process automation choices, enabling you to address business problems more effectively.

Integrated tool support for using Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) Connector Architecture (JCA) Version 1.0 and Version 1.5 resource adapters to access back-end systems

Enhanced tool integration for JCA adapters with tool plug-in extensions (available from IBM and IBM Business Partners)

Support for the entire suite of IBM WebSphere Business Integration Adapters

Support for Web services (based on Java Specification Request [JSR] 109 and Java application programming interface [API] for XML [JAX]-RPC technology)

Support for JMS through integrated WebSphere messaging resources (with full connectivity to existing IBM WebSphere MQ technology-based networks)

Support for calling Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) session beans
Wizards quickly and simply expose IBM CICS® or IBM IMS™ programs as enterprise services, including the ability to import definitions from COBOL, C structures, CICS basic mapping support (BMS), and IMS Message Format Service (MFS) definitions


I hope this helps.

Mark S

[BPC]

Hi,

we are working on an open source workflow project to address the issues which concerns to the human based workflow tasks inside a bpm environment.
In our project we have three subprojects:
- workflow modeller (eclipse based)
- workflow server (jee implementation)
- workflow client (eclipse rcp)
our goal is to integrate simple human based add hoc workflows into larger bpm sytems like the Websphere Process Server.

Open Source Project: http://www.imixs.org

I would appreciate for any feedback

regards
ralph

@ralph

Since you are interested in ad hoc human workflow, it might be
interesting for you that WebSphere Process Server has built-in support for ad hoc human tasks. Ad hoc human tasks support "ad hoc" types of human collaboration. You can create an ad hoc human task through an API. Typical scenarios for ad hoc human tasks include business processes where it cannot be predicted during modeling time when exactly a human task should be created, and to whom it should be allocated. A simple example can be found on the Business Process Choreographer Samples website, http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/bpcsamp/index.html. A user who creates such an ad hoc human task for another user can query the status and results of the task through a query API. WebSphere Process Server 6.0.2 will have additional enhancements to support ad hoc human collaboration, like follow-on tasks and subtasks.

An alternative to ad hoc human tasks are human tasks that participate in a pre-defined BPEL process, either inline or as a standalone task (connected to the BPEL process as an SCA service).

Regards, Michael

[devocean72]

Hi All,

Does anyone know which level of support exists in WPS 6.0.2 and WID 6.0.2?

I tried importing a BPEL 2.0 Final compliant process into WID but it threw some errors..

My process namespace was xmlns:bpws=http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsbpel/2.0/process/executable which is a BPEL 2.0 Final namespace and my query expression and process expressions are XPATH 2.0.

Based on what I see


1. WID 6.0.2 does not yet support BPEL 2.0. Right? Is it a safe assumption that WPS 6.0.2 also does not support BPEL 2.0 Final spec.
2. It also does not support XPATH 2.0.


Cheers
Dev

[faisal.taimoor]

For Open Source you should consider already available models like jBPM from jboss and there are others as well Current workflow systems have limitations on there actions actually they usually are part of some application where as BPM is created keeping in mind automating the enterprise / individual / departmental tasks.