Oracle Business Process Management Bootcamp 12c 30 Jan – 24 Feb 2017– free on-demand training and certification

Training On Demand: Oracle Business Process Management 12C

  • This Boot Camp is now open for registration to all partners taking specialist certification exams in the next 90 days. Please DO NOT REGISTER, if you are not taking a certification exam.
  • All registrations must be done using a company email. Personal emails will be rejected
  • In order to submit your registration you will be asked to login using your OPN (Oracle PartnerNetwork) account credentials. In case you do not have an OPN account please see the Profile badging step-by-step guide for partners on how to create the account. This process will also ensure your certifications are aligned to your company ID. All registrants must be badged and aligned to their company ID

For details please visit the registration page here.

image

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 image[7][2][2][2] Facebook clip_image002[8][4][2][2][2] Wiki

How to Auto Dismiss an Oracle BPM FYI Task by Vikram

clip_image002

The  FYI Task in Oracle BPM 12c can be used to notify a task recipient by displaying a task on the  BPM worklist without holding up the business process, it just continues to the next activity in the process flow. But for the task to go away, it has to be specifically dismissed by the task recipient by clicking on the “Dismiss” button under the Actions menu.

But what if we wanted these tasks to go away automatically or be auto-dismissed by the system? To Demonstrate this we created a simple BPM process that contains an FYI Task and a second task.

The human tasks are assigned to swim lane roles “FYIRole” and “ReviewerRole”. After deploying this BPM process, we startup an instance using the Test feature in Enterprise Manager to invoke the message start.

When we startup the process instance, we can login as a member of the “FYIRole” to see that the task exists in the Swim Lane role inbox. 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 image[7][2][2][2] Facebook clip_image002[8][4][2][2][2] Wiki

Correlations in Oracle BPM 12c by Antonis Antoniou

clip_image001

 

Correlations in Oracle Business Process Management (BPM) is a special mechanism used to associate a message with a conversation between different partners in a business process.

There are two types of correlations:

  • Automatic: This is the default and out-of-the-box correlation used between two business partners which makes use of a special token called "Conversation Id" to uniquely associate a message with a conversation via Web Service Addressing (WS-Addressing) to correlate a callback message using the "Conversation Id".
  • Message Based: This type of correlation enables the definition and use of "business-friendly" information carried as part of the message payload to be used to uniquely identify and associate a message with a conversation (for example, OrderId, CustomerId, etc.). This type of correlation enables the definition of multiple attributes referred to as "Correlation Properties" into various correlation sets know as "Correlation Keys".

So let’s see how you to use the two correlation types in a demo scenario. The simulated process will invoke an asynchronous process first by using the default correlations and then by using message-based correlations.
Create the basic BPM application and BPM project (I named it OracleBPM12cCorrelationsDemoApp and OracleBPM12cCorrelationsDemo respectively) and choose "Composite with BPMN Process" in step 3 of the "Create BPM Application" and click “Finish”. 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 image[7][2][2][2] Facebook clip_image002[8][4][2][2][2] Wiki

Rolling Up a BPM KPI into Business Architecture Models by Vikram

clip_image002

 

In BPM 12c, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can be used to measure the performance of the business process. You can use KPIs to improve the business process by identifying potential issues and addressing them. You can also roll up KPIs from an executable BPM process into a Business Architecture model.

To do this you need to publish your BPM project to the Process Asset Manager (PAM). You can add KPIs to the BPM Project in the Business Process Composer and then deploy the project. You can roll up this BPM KPI into a Business Architecture Model that links to it. This video walks through an example of how a KPI is rolled up into a Value Chain Model. It also does a quick walk through of the Process Criticality Report.

Video on Rolling up a BPM KPI into Business Architecture Models 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 image[7][2][2][2] Facebook clip_image002[8][4][2][2][2] Wiki

Error in getting XML input stream with Oracle Business Rules 12.2.1 by Jan van Zoggel

When trying to compile a Oracle ACM/BPM 12.2.1 project (with Oracle Business Rules) the following message throws up: “Error in getting XML input stream”

clip_image001

When Oracle Business Rules 12.2.1 generates it’s default XSD it uses the full system path instead of a relative path for it’s imports. So make sure to manually change the import configuration. 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 image[7][2][2][2] Facebook clip_image002[8][4][2][2][2] Wiki

How to Recover BPM Process Instances from a MDS 00054 Error in Oracle BPM 12.1.3 (Part 1) by Siming Mu

clip_image001

 

Introduction

There is an issue in Oracle SOA Suite Fabric layer in version 11.1.x. and 12.1.3. The issue is documented in Bug# 20517579: “Composites Lost Completely after redeployment and server restart”. This bug is fixed in version 12.2.1. A few customers have run into this bug. Once this bug is encountered, BPM server usually shows “MDS 00054: The file to be loaded oramds:/deployed-composites/CompositeName_rev1.0/composite.xml does not exist” error during server startup. The composite is no longer visible in EM and all User Tasks from this composite are not visible in BPM Workspace either. The composite appears to be lost.

One work-around for this issue is deploying the same composite as a higher version. Or customers can manually un-deploy their problematic version of the composite using WLST script and then deploy the same composite again. In either case, customers will lose all running instances of this composite. If this outcome is not desirable, we need to find a way to recover all running instances.

This multi-part blog will present one way to manually recover those instances. To make this process more understandable to readers, a very simple BPM composite is used to take you through the processes of deployment/undeployment, reproduction of the bug# 20517579 and MDS 00054 errors, and finally steps to recover instances. Along the way, we will look at changes in MDS and SOAINFRA tables due to normal life cycles of the sample composite and bug# 20517579.

Even though this bug is fixed in 12.2.1, I think the information documented in this blog will provide a valuable resource for understanding MDS and SOAINFRA schema.

What happens in MDS when a composite is deployed?

First, let’s take a look what happens in MDS when a BPM composite is deployed. To do that, we need a tool like MDS Explorer. Before any BPM composite is deployed, your MDS should look empty similar to the following image.

Now we will deploy a very simple BPM composite to check for changes in MDS. We can use a BPM composite similar to the following for our testing purposes.

Notice that I created two human tasks but only have one interactive activity in my BPM process. We will only use human task 1 for now and the other one will be used to generate the MDS 00054 error later.

After deploy this composite, the MDS  should look like this: 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 image[7][2][2][2] Facebook clip_image002[8][4][2][2][2] Wiki

The BPM 12c Process Monitor Dashboard in 5 Minutes by Jaideep

clip_image002

The Oracle BPM 12c Workspace offers two dashboards right out of the box. The Process Monitor and the Standard Dashboard. In this video we’ll go over how to use the process monitor.

Process monitor dashboards enable you to monitor and optimize business process execution. It can be a very helpful tool to be able to see process statistics like how many instances are currently running, how many have completed, how many have faulted etc over a time interval. It displays alerts that can help to identify process issues that are affecting performance. It also displays two performance graphs, the Workload per Activity and Performance per Activity.

Watch this video to get a quick overview of what the process monitor looks like and how to use it. 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 image[7][2][2][2] Facebook clip_image002[8][4][2][2][2] Wiki

BPM Suite 12c Server using Ansible by Christos Vezalis

clip_image001

This article describes a way to automate the installation of Oracle BPM 12.2.1 on Linux 7 server. I’m using Ansible to automate the configuration of Linux server and install the software. I’m also using Vagrant with Oracle Virtual Box to automatically provision a Linux 7 server and run the Ansible playbook on the virtual machine automatically for testing.
You can download the sample code in my GitHub account: https://github.com/cvezalis/ansible.oracle.bpm.12c

The sample source code contains an Ansible playbook and configuration for Vagrant. Before you run it you need to download the supported JDK 8 installation file (for example jdk-8u66-linux-x64.tar.gz) and put it on roles/linux-jdk/files folder, Fusion Middleware Infrastructure 12.2.1 installation file and put it on roles/fmw-software/files folder and Oracle BPM suite 12.2.1 installation and put it on roles/soa-software/files from Oracle support.
You need to have an Oracle Database up and running. If you do not have one or you want to create one with Ansible you can use my playbook for Oracle Database. Links are at the end of this article.
For run it you need to have installed Ansible, Vagrant and Virtual Box and then just do:
$ vagrant up
Playbook is idempotent so you can run it again in the same server several times to have your server in the expected status.
You can configure your infrastructure parameters on infra-vars.yml. As minimum (if you do not use my ansible playbook for create the database) you need to configure the database connection settings.
You can also set custom passwords on secrets.yml file. For oracle Linux user you need to set the password encrypted. On a Linux system use the following to create the encrypted password: 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 image[7][2][2][2] Facebook clip_image002[8][4][2][2][2] Wiki

Talk to your UI from your BPM process by Fernando

clip_image002

A few weeks back we had the opportunity to participante in an 12c challenge which had lots of different flavours (BPM, Coherence, ADF, etc.) and some very strict performance requirements.

Scenario

In this solution, an operator would be logged on to an ADF application showing different regions, with one particular region that would update as the BPM instance progressed through the different human tasks in the process. The team had opted for a simple solution to find out when a BPM instance had reached a human task: to poll the engine until a task was found.

The problem

Polling the engine could be a solution if the instance load was low but the objective was to handle thousands of short-lived instances in parallel, which would overload the engine with queries. In addition, there was the issue of having to wait an interval which resulted in additional time loss.

As with most push/pull cases, the ideal would be to approach the problem from the other side of the fence: instead of polling for events, pushing them from the BPMN process and reacting to these from the UI side.

For the first part, emitting events when the BPM tasks arrives at a human task would be straight-forward: the Human Workflow API provides a series of callback events that can be used, with the onAssigned event being the one to use. Therefore, the remaining question was how to receive and process events on the ADF side.

The solution

From the requirements, we needed a way to react when an event was received. This immediately lead to using JavaScript, as it is well supported in ADF. The only question left was what type of event to receive.

The answer lies in a new Weblogic 12c "native" feature: web-sockets (we can use web-sockets in 11g using Jersey as well). JavaScript can handle opening new sockets and listening for messages.

We developed a Web Socket application that would enable a server endpoint for every BPM instance (remember these are short-lived instances, thus there is no risk of running out of resources).

As the ADF app was responsible for creating BPM instances with a correlation key, it connected to the server endpoint using that very same key, effectively establishing a direct connection to the endpoint with its own channel.

On the server side, every onAssigned event that would be received by the human task callback class would publish a new message to the endpoint (using the same correlation key, in this case exposed as a public attribute in the human task) which in turn would be relayed by the server to the ADF UI. 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 image[7][2][2][2] Facebook clip_image002[8][4][2][2][2] Wiki

BPM and BPMN: A Concise Explanation by Mark Hearon

clip_image002

If you are reading this blog post, chances are you noticed the title and thought, “At last, a concise explanation of BPM and BPMN.  This is going to be great!”  It is not likely (however possible) that we may both be sorry by the end of our time together.  Consuming my reader’s digest explanation of BPM and BPMN may be as challenging as distilling the subject into short form!

Am I crazy?  Absolutely.  Are you crazy?  That all depends on whether you just answered that question aloud for others in the office to hear.  Regardless, fear not; this former public educator has your back.  Also, if you happen to be researching BPM and BPMN for the first time, consider this post a primer for further exploration.  To delve deeper, feel free to drop your questions and comments below.  I would be happy to reply.

What is BPM?

Business process mapping exists as a way of visually representing the processes of an enterprise for analysis.  Such analysis can reveal patterns of inefficiency that cost corporations a fortune in lost time and opportunity.  BPM is a codified method for improving business processes leading to greater efficacy and profit.

The bottom line: business process mapping pictorially delineates how work is accomplished in an organization. 

What is BPMN?

Business process modeling notation (which when complete can appear as anything from a benign diagram to a Tim Burton impression of Charlotte’s Web) is the pictographic language utilized to achieve the aforementioned BPM task.  Although a process map may delineate a highly-sophisticated business procedure, it can also be used to reflect simple processes.  This requires that BPMN be a flexible method of notating business processes.  The end result is a language that is relatively limited in scope and easy to apprehend.  The following may be considered the four (4) basic “words” of the BPMN language. 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 image[7][2][2][2] Facebook clip_image002[8][4][2][2][2] Wiki