VOSibilities

In a podcast we recorded last week,  Luc Clément — our product manager — mentioned in passing that we were about to post a new sample that describes in detail how to actually implement a human task in a business process.

Since we can’t post a link easily inside the podcast — and this sample is really something anyone considering a BPMS should see — I wanted to make sure to point out that the sample is now available here. If you want a trial download of ActiveVOS to walk through the sample in, please download it here.

ActiveVOS has become very popular among BPM users because it makes it easy to include human tasks in larger business processes. It’s obvious, of course, that no business process application would be complete without integrated human tasks. What’s been missing is a complete, standards-based way to combine automated and human tasks into a process as well as a standardized way to expose the work item list to real people. ActiveVOS’s standards-based implementation (using both BPEL4People and WS-Human Task) is detailed in this sample, which we recommend to anyone considering a BPM implementation.

You can work through the sample at your leisure. It’s a great way to learn how human tasks and processes work together in a modern BPMS. The sample is also a marked contrast to yesterday’s separate workflow systems which must be manually integrated with automated systems and which vary widely in the way the tasks are delivered to end users.