Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Blogware

I have coined this term - well there is a tool by that name but I can still say that this is term for "furthering your opinions under the garb of a blogger".
Now back to BPM - BPEL is not for humans- this is a thing I read on many blogs. However nothing can be farther from the truth. BPEL is extensible by nature, it allows a process developer to call out to any standard workflow service and create a Human Task. On completion the workflow server can update the process back / BPEL process can detect that the task has been marked complete and carry on the execution of the process.
Thankfully, there is a spec BPEL4People to answer all the acronym happy analysts and bloggers!

OMG - BPM - BPMN - ?

Spent three crucial days at OMG's BPM think tank. What I heard :
1. Standards are not important to business users. I heard this more than once - at an OMG conference thats interesting to say the least. My take - if standards dont matter than the analysts are going to make the same mistakes they did earlier. Custom made / built applications -> higher TCO (total cost of ownership) -> deal with costly Professional services folks :(
2. There is no common definition of BPM - among vendors, among anlysts and .... customers.
3. Field day for independent consultants to make even more consluting dollars while this conundrum lasts.
4. BPEL - the engine that executes your processes - I am surprised that the execution work horse is not being given its due.
5. ITP commerce had a good demo and were willing to show it to one and all - unlike other big name vendors and sponsors.
6. A new acronym BPDM was introduced. The spec does not have a XSD. Looks like a rushed attempt by one (or two) vendors - I may say. Even some of the (other) authors declined to comment / give more details.

Friday, July 13, 2007

BP Publisher

BP Publisher problem - : "BP Publisher problem - no models published


Checklist of things when publishing:
1. Login with the correct Filter.
2. Make sure that model types are included in the filter
3. Ensure User permission to view the models.
4. Ensure groups have hte permission
5. Last but not the least - makse sure the web export is activated. "

Sunday, July 08, 2007

Pools and Processes

BPMN spec suggests usage of pool as a boundary for a process. Specifically for internal private and abstract processes.
For an internal process - the mapping to a single process is an obvious choice. The whole goal of defining an internal process using BPMN is to be able to capture the sequence of steps required to accomplish a particular business goal. In terms of mapping an internal process definition to an executable notation. BPEL is an obvious choice for mapping to execuatble. It is industry standard for orchestrating services and human interaction (even more so with bpel4people spec).

For abstract processes again mapping a process to one BPEL4WS abstract process is the recommended approach. Even though the current version of spec does not delve into the mappings.