VOSibilities

This week on CTO Tuesdays Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley presented how events are represented in BPMN 2.0 and BPEL.

I think you will find Michael’s explanation of BPMN 2.0 event notation especially valuable.

I have attached two versions of the recorded webinar to this post. The first is an iPod-formatted .m4v. Also attached to this post is a Windows Media format .wmv file.

We have also made signing up for CTO Tuesdays and accessing the replays much easier. You can always sign up for the upcoming session of CTO Tuesdays at http://www.activevos.com/ctot. Replays are always available at http://www.ctotuesdays.com. And, an RSS feed of the replays is available at http://www.ctotuesdays.com/feed.

 CTO Tuesdays #3: BPMN and BPEL events [43:57m]: Download (448)
 CTO Tuesdays #3: BPMN and BPEL events [43:57m]: Download (4477)

This week’s topic on CTO Tuesdays was an introduction to the new WS-HumanTask standard for workflow. In this informative session, Michael Rowley describes the importance of the new standard for workflow, how it separates tasks from processing and how WS-HumanTask enables human activities to be seen as services in a process application.

Attached to this post are three files. A PDF of the slides Dr. Rowley presented, an iPod-formatted .m4v file (which requires QuickTime or iTunes to be installed) and a more-or-less standard .avi file. The .avi is the larger of the two video files.

Due to a technical error (I didn’t press “show” on GoToMeeting), the first few minutes of the video show Michael’s slides, not the ones I am discussing. Since this is just an introduction, you won’t miss anything. I’ve put those “missing” slides into the .pdf file, so you can follow along if you want to.

We had a very lively panel discussion at the end of the presentation; I hope you’ll have the time to listen to the discussion that follows the presentation.

As always, we are very interested in your feedback, comments and topic suggestions.

One more note: you can always register for the upcoming CTO Tuesdays session by visiting http://www.activevos.com/ctot. We hope you join us for next week’s webinar.

 CTO Tuesdays #2: Introduction to WS-HumanTask [49:03m]: Download (8502)
 CTO Tuesdays #2: Introduction to WS-HumanTask [48:56m]: Download (1086)
 CTO Tuesdays #2: Introduction to WS-HumanTask: Download (306)

We are very pleased to post the recording of the first episode of our new weekly webinar on BPM technology called CTO Tuesdays.

Every Tuesday, Active Endpoints’ CTO Michael Rowley, will present a topic of interest to BPM users. Our inaugural topic was an explanation of the meaning and uses of the BPMN 2.0 diamond symbol. If you are interested in learning BPMN 2.0 — or if you just want to brush up on some of the more advanced considerations in using this basic BPMN symbol — you will find this recording very instructive. Concepts are demonstrated in ActiveVOS 7’s new BPMN 2.0 modeler.

Attached to this post are two versions of the webinar: an iPod-formatted .m4v file our podcast subscribers will automatically receive and an H.264-encoded .avi file (which is much larger at about 113MB).

We welcome your input and suggestions for CTO Tuesdays. Contact us via email at editor at activevos dot com. Today, the best way to be notified of upcoming CTO Tuesdays is to be on our mailing list. And, the best way to get onto our mailing list is to download a trial of ActiveVOS. You can also register for upcoming CTO Tuesdays by clicking on the link in the right hand column of any interior page on www.activevos.com.

We are working hard on making registering for CTO Tuesdays easier. But because of the demand for education on topics like BPMN 2.0, we started the webinar series without waiting to dot all the “i’s” and cross all our “t’s.”

Update: You can now register for CTO Tuesdays by clicking the link in the right-hand column of any page on www.activevos.com except the home page. So, just navigate into the site a little and you’ll get a little reward: easy access to registration for CTO Tuesdays.

Updated update: You can now always register for the upcoming CTO Tuesdays at http://www.activevos.com/ctot.

We hope you enjoy this recording and that you will join us as your schedule permits for the live CTO Tuesdays every Tuesday at noon ET, 9am PT, 16:00 GMT (17:00 GMT after the end of US daylight savings time in November, 2009).

 

 CTOT #1: The BPMN diamond [39:32m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (4604)
 CTOT #1: The BPMN diamond [39:30m]: Download (7407)

Dennis Byron uses a clever metaphor (“Is it floor wax or dessert topping?”) as a way to describe what’s new in ActiveVOS 7.0 in a post on itbusinessedge.com.

Last week, CTO Michael Rowley and I showed ActiveVOS 7 to Rob Barry of TechTarget’s SOA Talk blog.  I know it’s a party foul to quote yourself in a blog post, but we are grateful that Rob chose to highlight one of the main accomplishments we believe we have achieved for BPM in ActiveVOS 7:

“BPM suites that focus on business users, they don’t get technical enough,” said Alex Neihaus, VP of marketing at Active Endpoints. “They become islands of computing and sit off by themselves. And with BPMS for architects and developers, the level of cost and complexity is beyond the level of what most people are willing to undertake.”

This “third way” between the cost and complexity of stacks from Oracle and IBM and the unfulfilled promises of Lombardi and Pegasystems to integrate easily across the enterprise are why we believe we have become so popular among development teams. Looking past old buying habits and the new politics of “end user” BPM, our customers are seeking great technology at an affordable price that can be used to create integrated processes as that are themselves services.

You can read Rob’s entire blog post here.

As we promised in part 1 of of our discussion on the new features in the ActiveVOS 7 BPMS, we are delighted to post part 2 of a conversation among me (Alex Neihaus), Luc Clément and Michael Rowley. In this second podcast, Michael and Luc cover topics that are of interest to enterprise architects, developers and operations staff. Topics include continuous development (including support for the open-source Hudson project) and new features in the BPMN designer that improve productivity and operational enhancements.

We hope you enjoy this podcast.

 

 VOSibilities podcast #37: ActiveVOS 7.0, part 2 [28:32m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1599)

We’re very excited to be able to post a sneak preview of the brand-new BPMN 2.0 designer that’s coming in ActiveVOS 7.0.

We’ve also posted a screenshot tour of our new ActiveVOS Central application.

We hope to have additional screenshot galleries up soon.

ActiveVOS 7.0 is a major new release of the business process management system (BPMS) that development teams love. The document attached to this post gives an overview of new features in the release. The document discusses the new BPMN 2.0-compliant modeler with BPEL execution and no round-trip problems, a new AJAX capable services-based forms designer and ActiveVOS Central. ActiveVOS Central is a complete, out-of-the-box solution for managing work, accessing reports and graphs of system activity and creating processes. In addition, the document describes additional new features of the BPMS that improve productivity and enhance collaboration between an extended development team and end users.

This version is a draft of the What’s New in ActiveVOS 7.0 document. Please check back frequently for updated versions.

 What's New in ActiveVOS 7.0: Download (1003)

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Michael Rowley, Active Endpoints CTO, will be presenting a talk on the Service Component Architecture (SCA) at the UCLA Java Users Group on Thursday, August 27, 2009. Details are in the media advisory attached to this post.

 Media Advisory: Rowley to present SCA at UCLA Java User's Group: Download (225)

I’m pleased that my recent disagreement with JP Morgenthal was noticed by Joe McKendrick, on his Service Oriented blog, and by Loraine Lawson at ITBusinessEdge. Now, having set the record straight, we can step back a little and start a more general discussion about SCA and why it’s a powerful new approach for developing applications. Loraine made a few comments in particular that got me thinking more about the value of SCA to a chief architect who is “prioritizing and rationalizing applications from an enterprise perspective.”

Once this architect has prioritized the needs of IT for the enterprise, it is critical that the architect’s development team has the right “tools” to update or create the applications that will meet those enterprise priorities. The development team also wants to improve its ability to maintain the application in the long run. I put the word “tools” in quotes in the previous sentence to emphasize the fact that I am using the word in its most general form. Your programming language is a tool. The design patterns you follow are tools. And, of course, the middleware infrastructure you use is a tool. J.P. is just wrong to assert that SCA will lock you into dependency on a vendor. There is no reason that middleware has to lock you in to a vendor any more than using a programming language locks you into a vendor, but that is only true if the middleware uses…

standards (and the right standards at that). If SCA were just some vendor’s tool that was promising great things, J.P. and everyone else would be right to be skeptical. But it isn’t proprietary, it’s a standard.

There are a few important reasons why this is important. It is always difficult to hire people who are skilled in a vendor’s proprietary technology and any application that depends on the technology is always at risk, since the vendor may choose to “improve” the technology in a direction that is retrograde for you. Or, the vendor could possibly abandon it altogether.

A good middleware standard is like a high-level language. It raises the level of abstraction that developers work in, so they can think about the actual problem being solved instead of fiddling with bits – or SOAP headers.  There are three recent standards that do exactly this: BPEL, BPMN and SCA.  BPEL is a language that is specifically designed around creating and using services, so it is also inherently middleware. Then there is BPMN, which standardizes the notation — the look of the business process on the design canvas — so that developers and non-developers alike can share an understanding of what is going on. And finally there is SCA, which allows developers to create, wire, package and deploy services without having to sweat the details of the numerous WS-* standards for every service that is created or used.  It, like high-level languages, raises the level of abstraction without significantly constraining what a developer can accomplish.

Forcing a development team to avoid recent advances in middleware today would be like having a manager in the 1970’s forcing their developers to program in assembler due to a mistrust of languages like FORTRAN. Productivity would suffer.

Attached to this post is a recently completed “technology audit” of ActiveVOS, written by Mike Thompson of the Butler Group. This is a must-read for anyone interested in a balanced, impartial description of ActiveVOS and its BPM capabilities.

 Butler Group Technology Audit of ActiveVOS 6.2: Download (1337)

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.

Keith Swenson has posted this interesting list of questions to ask a BPM vendor.  I liked his emphasis on standards, since it is so important that the hard work that goes into creating business processes not be trapped in proprietary technology.  However, I think he concentrated on the wrong standard — XPDL.  If you really care about safeguarding your investment in your processes, the standard that you should care the most about is BPEL4People.

Don’t get me wrong, XPDL has its place.  ActiveVOS can both import and export XPDL version 2.1 (the latest version).   But XPDL is not a technology that will allow you to take an business process that is executable on one vendor’s BPM engine and move it to another vendor’s engine.  It just won’t work.  If you are lucky, the resulting business process diagram will look recognizable because the “abstract model” (as XPDL calls it) will import successfully.  But don’t get your hopes up about saving all the work that you did on the executable details.

The problem is not that XPDL has no place to put those executable details — it does.  It just doesn’t put enough constraints on what should go there.  There are just too many different things you can do, so no two tools do the same things.   Also, the bar for being able to say that you support XPDL 2.1 is just too low.  If a tool exports something that conforms to the XML Schema (possibly with liberal use of extensions) and import doesn’t barf on any Schema-valid input, then the tool conforms.  But don’t look for guarantees that you will see, much less be able to execute, anything reasonable.

By contrast, users of ActiveVOS have had great success in using BPEL-based business processes that were created by either IBM, Oracle or TIBCO tooling.  They have also found that the BPEL generated by ActiveVOS can be used by the tools of those other vendors.  That is real investment protection.

I do like Keith’s idea of having a list of questions for BPM vendors to help in the evaluation process.  I think the best way to organize such an evaluation is around four key areas.

Are the key BPM standards supported?

• Does the product generate executable WS-BPEL 2.0 processes?
• Can you model processes using BPMN?
• Does the product use the BPEL4People for activities that are handled by people?
• Are worklists and tasks exposed through the WS-HumanTask standard?
• Does it support the important enterprise web-service standards, such as WS-Security and WS-ReliableMessaging?
• How about non-SOAP access to services, such as JMS, REST or plain Java?
• Does the product import and export XPDL?

Does the development environment make the process developer highly productive, especially for processes that are larger than mere toys?  For some important examples, how easy is it to:

• Incorporate existing web services into a process?
• Detect changes to web service definitions and update the process accordingly?
• Define services provided by the process (including defining XML Schemas and WSDL)?
• Define new human tasks using existing data definitions (XSDs)?
• Prepare the input data for human tasks or services?
• Support services that “call back” into a running process, and specify the appropriate data to use for correlation?
• Find all uses of a variable within a large process?

An executable process is deployed software.  What support is available for ensuring and maintaining its quality?

• Is there test case generation?
• Is there test suite support?
• Is there remote debugging?
• Is there Metadata for controlling the difference between staging and deployment?
• Can you new versions without effecting existing process instances?
• Can you deploy new versions that do change existing process instances?

What can be done to a running instance?  Can you:

• See where it has been (with anotations on the process diagram)?
• View current and historical data?
• Change data?
• Skip activities?
• Single step through activities?
• Rewind execution, optionally reverting all process data to what it was?

What kind of runtime console support is there?

• Can you get reports with either operational or business information?
• Can the end user create any kind of new report and incorporate it into the runtime console?
• How powerful is the query capability to find a process instance you care about?

All of these characteristics of a BPMS will eventually be important to anyone that is creating the kind of critical business processes that will really transform a business.  Knowing the answers to these questions can help you to avoid making the wrong choice.

You have to admit that the economic news these days has become truly frightening. In the US, joblessness has reached levels not seen in decades. Across the planet, governments are being forced to intervene in their economies in unprecedented ways.

But this isn’t a blog about economics. Instead, it’s a blog about a technology — business process management (BPM) — that allows enterprises to respond to these challenging times.

Jim Sinur of Gartner wrote this week about how customers’ perceptions of what BPM can accomplish for them today have changed from what they were just before the current economic upheaval. And to nobody’s surprise, the economic climate has pushed aside technical benefits in favor of bottom-line considerations like reducing costs and improving quality.

We have just one suggestion to add to the mix: think about saving big bucks in the BPM system itself.  Consider the costs of having to integrate multiple “stack” products to achieve a BPM application — having to build the car from a kit before you can drive it. Consider the costs of BPMN-only systems which cannot directly execute the application without being either proprietary or adding megabytes of hand-coded Java. Consider, finally, the costs of delay because your company simply cannot afford millions for a BPM system.

We like to think that ActiveVOS is the ideal product for these times: open, comprehensive, all-in-one, easy-to-learn and -deploy. But most of all, affordable. Maybe the silver lining in all this economic turmoil is that customers’ costly-is-better price prejudice with respect to BPM will dissolve on the alter of necessity and allow them to discover BPM that’s both better and less costly. That’s ActiveVOS. And it’s one reason we’ve recently displaced IBM at a giant European insurer and why we continue to gain market traction. Do yourself a favor: see if your BPM vendor posts its prices. We do, right here. We want you to know going in what a great system costs.

When your company is looking to BPM applications to save more pennies, it only makes sense that you would want to squeeze costs out of the BPM system itself. And it’s pretty clear that what Jim’s clients were thinking, too.

Today, Active Endpoints announced that UK-based commodities trader Trafigura, Ltd. has implemented a BPM application written in ActiveVOS for its risk assessment function. This application was written by Brown Study, Ltd., an Active Endpoints partner.

The press release and accompanying white paper are attachments to this post.

 Commodities Trader Trafigura, Ltd. Redesigns Core Systems with ActiveVOS: Download (597)
 Brown Study White Paper: Download (410)