Integration developer Adam Swift at Fastenal describes how his team uses ActiveVOS to quickly implement SOA-based applications for vital business processes, including an order management system. Read the article here.
Today, Active Endpoints announced the winners of the Bring SOA Home for the Holidays contest, where entrants were asked to submit something which shows how they used their free, 30-day supported trial of ActiveVOS in the development of their own BPM and SOA applications in exchange for a chance to win one of three Lenovo® IdeaPad® netbooks.
Selected from hundreds of entries, the three winners were chosen based on creativity, thoroughness and quality of work:
1st place: Brian Carey, President, Simple Empowerment of BPMS, Inc. (client project: Perot Systems)
2nd place: Ervin Nemesszeghy, Software Architect/Java EE Developer, Hardcomsoft
3rd place: Karl Geppert, CTO, Chemwatch
Wanna win some cool prizes? Enter our current contest BPM in a Bottle for your chance to win either a T-Mobile® G1™ smart phone with Google™ or a Logitech® Squeezebox™ Boom network music player. Contest ends March 27 so don’t delay!
Today, in the winter of our economic discontent, Active Endpoints has announced something fun: a contest in which the winners will take home some very cool prizes. Our “BPM in a bottle” contest embodies several important ideas about ActiveVOS. First, that BPM is best accomplished with an all-in-one, standards-based system. Second, that BPM system should be very affordably priced. Third, that it should be fun and easy to use that BPM system to automate business processes.
Read all the details in the press release attached to this post. Enter at www.absolutebpm.com — and good luck!
Last week, Active Endpoints’ Michael Rowley participated in the quarterly face-to-face meeting of the OASIS Technical Committee working on the BPEL4People and WS-Human Task specifications. In this very engaging podcast, Rowley describes the inner workings of TC’s (something you usually don’t hear much about), describes the work the TC has recently accomplished and articulates the grand vision for business process management (BPM) and workflow that the committee has been working on.
If you’ve been wondering about the state of standards-based BPM and workflow systems or, frankly, if you think BPEL and BPEL4People have dropped out of sight, I strongly encourage you to listen to this podcast. You’ll hear how some the of most important thought-leaders in the IT world, including IBM, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, TIBCO and, of course, Active Endpoints, are working towards a BPM world in which standardized systems make it possible to implement business processes in ways we haven’t been able to reach as yet.
We hope you enjoy this look at BPM today and in the future.
VOSibilities podcast #27 An Update on the BPEL4People Standard [24:53m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (290)We know this time of year is supposed to be slow, but we’ve got a present for you anyway. Hot off the presses is a product review of ActiveVOS 6.0 by Paul O’Connor. Paul is SOA Practice Director and Chief SOA Architect for e-brilliance LLC (a leading SOA consultancy).
As Paul puts it “Do yourself a favor and check out this great visual orchestration system.” If you have not yet considered ActiveVOS to orchestrate your SOA based applications, make it one of your New Year’s resolutions.
One week left to enter our Bring SOA Home for the Holidays contest! Download ActiveVOS and submit your good ideas. You could win a very, very cool Lenovo netbook.
Please, not yet another loan application demo! Far from that. We wanted to do something totally different that visitors to the site could grok quickly by first viewing a Camtasia presentation; that could then be experienced online through a hosted version of the demo; and for the tinkerers at heart, that could be taken apart to learn how it was all built using ActiveVOS.
What better than a “Classic Car Restoration” scenario to demonstrate how, with ActiveVOS, you can model, implement, test and deploy a service orchestration which incorporates human task; Java and web service orchestration, task and process management; activity monitoring and reporting; complex event processing (CEP); and a whole lot more.
We set out to automate the estimate process for Vintage Old Stock, a classic car restoration shop. Play an eight-minute demo to get the feel of the estimate process. Then look under the hood and see how we used ActiveVOS Designer to model and document the estimate process; how we designed and implemented the process; how we simulated and tested it; and how we deployed the process. And don’t stop there! See how ActiveVOS leverages CEP and how, through the ActiveVOS Console , you have complete visibility into your processes and tasks.
I don’t like being just a passenger. If you’re like me, you’ll want to test drive the demo for yourself and take it for a spin. Before you head out, read the Owner’s Manual. Take the demo for a lap by requesting an estimate. Act as the estimator and generate an estimate. Look under the hood to see the process in action. User info can be found in the Owner’s Manual.
We’ve also made available to tinkerers the ActiveVOS Orchestration Project and a fully configured demo environment. For those already using ActiveVOS Designer, download the Vintage Old Stock Orchestration Project files here. If you want to work with the pre-configured demo environment locally, download it here. Enjoy the drive!
Cheers and Happy Holidays,
Luc
‘Twas the night before New Year’s and all through the house
Not a process was broken, not even a browse.
The ActiveVOS users sat by their computers with anticipation
In hopes that the “Bring SOA Home for the Holidays” judges would like their contest submission.
When out in the judges’ office there arose such a clatter
Every Active Endpoints employee wondered what was the matter.
And what to their wondering eyes should appear
But the judges with the list of three lucky winners of some really cool Lenovo gear!
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I hope you enjoyed reading this little parody of “The Night Before Christmas” as much as I enjoyed writing it. Seriously, we have some good news. Because of the great response to our contest “Bring SOA Home for the Holidays,” we have extended the submission deadline to New Year’s Eve – December 31, 11:59pm.
It’s easy and fun! Download a supported 30-day trial of ActiveVOS, the world’s leading visual orchestration system, and tell us how you would use it in your SOA, BPM, BPEL or BPMN projects. Make this holiday season a winner for you and your company. Try ActiveVOS…win a Lenovo netbook! Visit www.soaholiday.com for details and contest rules.
Happy Holidays!
Active Endpoints, in collaboration with fifteen other vendors and enterprises, announces formation of group to promote web services interoperability.
Rich Seeley has written a very interesting article about how visual modeling of business processes enables IT to work more closely with business users. Rich also points out how ActiveVOS has achieved great results for Fastenal.
In this podcast episode, I talk with Active Endpoints’ UK partner and T-Impact CEO Keith Stagner about T-Impact’s approach to helping clients achieve rapid ROI via improved applications with SOA-based BPM applications.
I hope you enjoy hearing about how SOA is being used in the UK, what UK customers are looking for in their BPM applications and why T-Impact is succeeding even in these tough economic times.
(And, oh yes, there’s a commercial for ActiveVOS in the podcast. But a) I can be forgiven for doing one since that’s my job and b) it’s in the context of Keith’s discussion of how T-Impact uses ActiveVOS to meet his organization’s strict objectives for client ROI in their SOA projects.)
As always, we’d love to know what you think. Comments here or email to me are more than welcome.
VOSibilities podcast #23: An Interview with T-Impact CEO Keith Stagner [21:03m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (333)Today, I am very pleased to be able to offer the first in a series of product “vignettes,” or little single-feature demos of ActiveVOS that take less than five minutes to watch. We believe these accomplish two things. First, they show what’s possible in SOA-based applications using the visual orchestration system’s features. Second, they are educational and can be very valuable to evaluators and customers who are looking to learn how to create BPMN- and BPEL-based business process applications in a true SOA environment. So, you can learn “how to” and/or see how it would be done in a jiffy.
We have a long list of product vignettes planned, but we wanted to start the series off with a bang: a demonstration of how Java developers can use POJO’s — or plain old Java objects — directly in an ActiveVOS orchestration. We introduced this in ActiveVOS 6.0 and we know from the response we’ve been getting that Java developers have been looking for something exactly like this to bridge their current object-oriented development world and the new world of SOA-based BPM applications.
So, we hope you enjoy this little vignette and we hope to hear from you about what you’d like us to demo in the future.
VOSibilities podcast #22: Creating SOA applications using Java and POJO's: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (608)
VOSibilities podcast #22: Creating SOA applications using Java and POJO's: Download (81)Today, we are pleased to announce another customer success story, this time with Fastenal Corp. As you can read in the press release attached to this post, Fastenal has built SOA-based applications with ActiveVOS that are key to its international expansion as well as its future growth in the US marketplace.
We are proud to be able to help Fastenal achieve its objectives and thank them for allowing us to tell this story.
A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to review a new book on creating SOA-based applications. I was surprised to be invited to review a technical book because I am pretty lightweight technically. But I was also pleased that this blog has attracted enough readership so that the publisher thought a mention here could help get the word out about this new book.
Despite my trepidation that reading the book would tax my understanding of the technology (after all, I am a marketing guy, not a developer), I found reading Business Process Driven SOA using BPMN and BPEL (Matjaz Juric and Kapil Pant, 305 pages, Packt Publishing, August 2008, $59.99) surprisingly easy.
Still, to be very honest much of the technical discussion was lost on me. To my novice eye, the book is well organized and well presented. The initial chapter presents an excellent argument for developing SOA applications; later chapters move progressively from conceptual modeling to BPMN and then into the deployment of processes using BPEL.
My only regret is that the authors were forced to (I hope they didn’t want to) use the Oracle stack of products to illustrate many of the actual implementation considerations, especially when describing BPEL. Naturally, it hurts me to read all about a competitor’s product, especially when we believe ActiveVOS 6.0’s BPMN-to-BPEL integration is far easier to use and implement. Had the authors used the ActiveVOS visual orchestration system, they could have eliminated pages of Oracle product names descriptions and “when to use what” recommendations. Maybe the authors will consider changing for the next edition of the book.
But as I read the book, it occurred to me that my surface understanding of the technology actually made it easier for me to see the “theology” inherent in the BPMN and BPEL debate we so often hear about. Consider this passage:
The fundamental difference between BPMN and BPEL is also the reason why some tools have started providing extensible features…to allow a round-trip feedback loop between the business process users working in BPMN and technical teams developing in BPEL…This is a topic of debate, as we are asking our business community to think like a programmer and model business processes to create consistent technical output in the form of BPEL, which is unfair.
Here, the authors have the exposed the fundamental issue for creating SOA-based BPM applications: should the top-down, business-analyst creates-a-model-for-everything, BPMN view of work reign supreme? Or should the structured, execution-oriented BPEL approach to automation be ascendant?
My answer? It depends. If you are in a company in which the objective is 100% transparency of processes, in which people are told what to do and how to do it, in which creativity flows from the BPMN diagram, your approach is clear…and doubleplusgood. (And, yes, I have an opinion.)
OTOH, if you believe that computers are tools for people, that it’s better to let machines do the repetitive parts of a process while easily including less-structured human tasks, you have the choice of a different approach using BPEL and BPMN. And I think the choice has a lot to do with your company’s cultural ethos.
Still, what’s nice about these standards is even though they’ve been put together in a shotgun wedding and the marriage is far from comfortable, the union of these two technologies gives users ultimate flexibility to implement SOA applications as they prefer. And as a book to illustrate how to implement these choices, you can’t go wrong with Business Process Driven SOA using BPMN and BPEL (as long as you don’t use Oracle stuff to do it).
Rich Seeley at searchSOA.com covers the release of ActiveVOS 6.0 in this story.
SD Times’s David Worthington covers the release of ActiveVOS 6.0 in this story.
