How to implement permissions on your activities with Oracle Adaptive Case Management? by Jan van Zoggel

When our Oracle Adaptive Case Management project started we initially used the default permissions on the case (Public, Restricted) to make sure our activities where available to the correct BPM application roles. A complex authorization model of roles, with LDAP groups, with users to allow access to the activities, but also custom UI and human tasks.

An important concept of knowledge worker automation (on which off course our whole case is based) is that the users should not be locked into rigid BPM processes (and access constraints I would like to add) which the IT department came up with. So activities on one hand would be allowed access to by all internal knowledge workers anyway, because: “hey .. they are knowledge workers and know best, right ?”

The first exception

However for some exceptions we got the requirements to only allow a specific role to a specific activity. So what we did was adding a new permission for that role and made sure that the activity was only available for that role. Read the complete article here.

SOA & BPM Partner Community

For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki

Technorati Tags: SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,OPN,Jürgen Kress

Case management for the knowledge worker era by Jan van Zoggel

Companies have been using workflow and content management for many, many years. In IT we got used to the term Business Process Management (BPM) whenever we spoke of automated process execution. Not so strange since the term BPM was adopted by all the major software vendors and has received a lot of attention as “the” way to achieve process automation and integration.

There are however many different definitions of BPM, where some are technical and others are business oriented. But if we look at the Gartner definition:

Business process management (BPM) is a discipline that uses various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, and optimize business processes.  A business process coordinates the behavior of people, systems, information, and things to produce business outcomes in support of a business strategy. Processes can be structured and repeatable or unstructured and variable. Though not required, technologies are often used with BPM. BPM is key to align IT/OT investments to business strategy

An interesting (and correct) remark by Gartner that technology is not required for BPM, however the general idea (in IT) has been that BPM equals process automation. The business process is summarized to a complete definition until the level that it can be executed as a program. The efficiency gains of automating the business process much exceed the up-front effort to fully identify it and make it executable. An effort which can initially be very large where the cost is only repaid over many instances of the process. So this approach will only work on highly predictable which is highly repeatable. It’s in some way identical to a factory production line where a huge amount of products justifies the initial up-front factory costs. Read the complete article here.

SOA & BPM Partner Community

For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki

Technorati Tags: SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,OPN,Jürgen Kress

Adaptive Case Management Methodology Kit by Jürgen Kress

As part of the book Best Practices for Knowledge Workers (digital edition) we published an Adaptive Case Management Methodology. The proposed ACM Methodology is based on the five phases, which covers typical software engineering disciplines: Business Modeling, Visualization, Analysis, Design and Implementation. New software artifact models for ACM user interfaces (ACM Workspace) and ACM solution analysis and design (ACM Canvas) are also among the contributions of this work. ACM design leverages the recently established Case Management Modeling Notation (CMMN v1.1). Templates of software artifacts, developed for each methodology phase, are also presented. These support a guided outcome and ensure projects progress and success.

The methodology was developed over the past two years from work and analysis of actual ACM projects in different industries. In this dissertation, a Case Study is completely described and implemented, as a proof-of-concept for the proposed methodology. Get the kit here.

SOA & BPM Partner Community

For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki

Technorati Tags: SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,OPN,Jürgen Kress

Sending Dynamic HTML-based Emails for SOA and BPM Projects by Mark Peterson

Sending email notifications in Oracle BPEL or BPM projects can turn into a major effort if you are not using ADF–and sometimes even if you are using ADF. If you use ADF, you can leverage features such as HTML editors and actionable emails. But in many situations you may need a stand-alone email formatting solution that doesn’t involve ADF, that can produce a simple HTML-based email, and that doesn’t need to be actionable. You will find that that simple SOA-based approach helps you implement your requirements efficiently and effectively.

This approach

• Integrates with BPM and BPEL
• Is HTML-based and can contain dynamic information from a database
• Leverages BPEL and BPM direct assignments and role-based assignments
• Includes a template selector, for sending different types of emails
• Handles attachments
• Intercepts and redirects emails for testing purposes

A detailed description of this email notification system is described below. Upon request we would be happy to provide the actual project code describe here.

Input XML

This is a sample of the input XML. Notice the data includes

• A record ID – Used to pull data from the database for embedding information in the email
• Read the complete article here.

SOA & BPM Partner Community

For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki

Technorati Tags: SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,OPN,Jürgen Kress

BPM 12c Migration – A Deep Dive into a Simple 10g Process Migration by Aaron Dolan

Since Oracle BPM 12c was released this summer, many of our legacy BPM 10g customers have begun to ask what to expect from the migration path.  As my colleague Suyash Khot discussed in his article Oracle BPM 12c Migration – A Hand of Friendship to Oracle BPM 10g, Oracle has luckily given us a migration utility to kick-start the process of moving code from Oracle BPM 10g to Oracle BPM 12c.  While this utility is incredibly valuable and indeed very easy to use, it is well worth discussing the advantages and challenges this conversion presents us with.

This is the first in a series of articles where I’ll explore how various 10g coding patterns are translated into 12c and how we might overcome some of the issues this presents us with.  While in many cases the conversion is clean and maintenance-free, in other cases there is work to be done and issues to be on the lookout for.

In preparation for this article, I created a very simple, happy path Order Entry process in Oracle BPM 10g:   

You’ll notice that this consists of the “Place Customer Order” Global Creation Activity that calls the “PlaceCustomerOrderSF” screenflow: Read the complete article here.

SOA & BPM Partner Community

For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki

Technorati Tags: SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,OPN,Jürgen Kress

Adaptive Case Management Methodology published in Best Practices for Knowledge Workers (digital edition)

Working on an Adaptive Case Management (ACM) opportunity? Read the ACM Methodology published in the Best Practices for Knowledge Workers (Digital edition) book.

BPM-based solutions have brought major advances to work organization and automation. However, given BPM’s strong basis on formal workflow definition, oftentimes BPM solutions are not well suited for work scenarios where a precise workflow cannot be strictly defined. Work in such scenarios is highly dependent on knowledge-based decisions about activities and outcomes, leading to multiple work paths and business rules that can become quite complex or even unfeasible to model and completely automate. In these cases, a different technology support approach is required. The focus is not to isolate and automate decisions and rules, but rather to deliver opportunistic information support to the knowledge worker to accomplish them. Adaptive Case Management (ACM) rises as a successful design pattern for this. Get the eBook here.

SOA & BPM Partner Community

For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki

Technorati Tags: SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,OPN,Jürgen Kress

Real estate valuation using Process Cloud Service by Stefan Woermcke

Real estate valuation using Oracle Process Cloud Service by

End to end process flow demonstrating how to use the pre built property evaluation process running on Oracle Process Cloud Service. Watch the video here

SOA & BPM Partner Community

For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki

Technorati Tags: SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,OPN,Jürgen Kress