SOA Community Newsletter June 2013

June 27, 2013 2 Comments

Dear SOA partner community member

Thanks for showing us your interest to rerun the Fusion Middleware Summer Camps! After knowing your suggestions we are happy to announce the 3rd edition of our advanced Fusion Middleware training. The camps will take place from August 26th – 30th 2013 in Lisbon Portugal. Topics will include Adaptive Case Management (ACM) as part of BPM Suite, b2b, Advanced SOA and SOA Governance. Please make sure you plan and book your seat in advance – (Booking is on the basis of first come first seat!).

Thanks for all your efforts to become certified and Specialized. For all the experts who achieved the SOA Suite 11g Essentials or BPM Suite 11g Certified Implementation Specialist, you can download a logo for your blog or business card at the Competence Center. For all the companies who achieved a SOA or BPM specialization you can request a nice Plaques for your office.

As part of our Industrial SOA article services we published “Canonizing a Language for Architecture” in the Service Technology Magazine and on Oracle Technology Network. If you write books or a blog – make sure you share it with us!

Cloud Computing is the hottest topic in IT, specially as an architect you should be aware of the concepts and technology, therefore I highly recommend you Thomas Erl’s latest book named “Cloud Computing”.

In the BPM space, Adaptive Case Management (ACM) is the hottest topic, with BPM PS6 the backend ACM functionality and an ACM sample application are available. You can even combine this hype with Customer Experience. The BPM section in this newsletter reflects the high importance of the topic and includes BPM PS6 video showing process lifecycle,BPM Resource Kit, Functional Testing, Introduction to Web Forms, Customized Workspace Application and Instance Patching Demo.

B2B also become more and more popular in the Oracle SOA Suite. If you could not attend the training organized in the month May, we offer you an additional B2B training as a part of the Summer Camps or you can download the B2B training material from our SOA Community Workspace (SOA Community membership required).

Thanks to all for sharing the valuable SOA content with our community! Special thanks to ec4u for the new reference of SOA Suite and AIA Foundation Pack at a Swiss insurance company. It is time to submit a SOA and BPM  reference request today!

In this edition of the newsletter you will see Guido and Ronald’s second part of OSB article series and Kathiravan Udayakumar’s published an exclusive article on SOA Suite best practice. If you want to submit your content for the next edition of the Newsletter then please feel free to submit it to myself.

The A-Team is an excellent contributor to the best practice – make sure you visit the new A-Team page and read their articles such as Getting to know Maven.

Also on the SOA side, we have published many new articles from the community Oracle SOA Suite for the Busy IT Professional by Frank Munz, SOA Suite Knowledge – Polyglot Service Implementation with Groovy by Alexander Suchier, QA82 Analyzer – Automated Quality Assurance for Oracle SOA Suite Projects, Verifying the Target by Anthony Reynolds and a new book called Oracle SOA Governance 11g Implementation book by Luis Augusto Weir.

Two new SOA on-demand training courses NEW – Oracle Business Rules Self-Study Course & Introduction Human Workflow online course are available now!

Make use of the Summer Time and get trained – hope to see you in Lisbon for the Summer Camps!

Jürgen Kress
Oracle SOA & BPM Partner Adoption EMEA

To read the newsletter please visit http://tinyurl.com/soanewsJune2013 (OPN Account required)

To become a member of the SOA Partner Community please register at http://www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

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Cutting Edge versus Just Average? Your SOA, Got BPM? by Mala Ramakrishnan

June 25, 2013 2 Comments

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has completely transformed IT from the time it was introduced well over a decade ago. Organizations have been re-plumbing their infrastructure for reusability, efficiency and gain and succeeding with it. Best practices have emerged and people and technology have matured. We have got better at delivering on a stable platform on mission critical applications and services.

Yet, there is this one secret that sets some SOA customers apart from the others. These companies grow and revolutionize their business and not just transform their IT infrastructure. The differences seem subtle for an untrained eye examining these organizations externally. And from within the company, it’s a bit like an ant sitting on an elephant, hard to differentiate between the IT trunk and business tail.

What is it that some organizations do differently that makes them succeed beyond SOA?
These organizations pull in business people more and more to weigh into their IT decisions. They wrench understanding process over services. They don’t settle easily when bridging business metrics and IT performance. They anguish over business requirements not translating seamlessly and quickly into IT. IT is not just an enabler but a pillar that revolutionizes their business. Okay, I’ll give it to you. These organizations layer Business Process Management (BPM) on top of their SOA.

BPM WebcastThink about lifeblood business processes in your own organizations. If you are Fedex, this would be shipping and handling. If you are Stanford Hospital, this would be patient case-management: from on-boarding through discharge and follow-up care. If you are Wells Fargo, this would be loan origination. Now think about how your SOA ties into your business process.

  • Can you decouple your business processes from your SOA so that the two can transform and change independent of each other?
  • Can you forecast success metrics for your business process, make the changes across the board and then look back over different periods of time to see if you are on track?
  • Are your critical business processes entrenched in the minds of few experts in your organization or does everyone from the receptionist to your enterprise architect to your CEO understand what they can do to revolutionize it?

Business Process Management is a superset of SOA. It is the process of getting your business to articulate business value and metrics and have it implemented in IT without any loss in translation. It is the act of extracting the business process from the minds of experts and IT applications in your organization and valuing them as assets for performance and gain. BPM is stepping outside your SOA and moving your organization to the next level of innovation.

Oracle is accelerating BPM across industries with the latest launch. Join us to understand how BPM can give your organization a cutting edge over your SOA.

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.

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BPM PS6 video showing process lifecycle in more detail (30min) by Mark Nelson

June 24, 2013 Leave a comment

If the five minute video I shared last week has whet your appetite for more, then this might be just what you are looking for!

The same international team that has made that video – Andrew Dorman, Tanya Williams, Carlos Casares, Joakim Suarez and James Calise – have also created a thirty minute version that walks through in much more detail and shows you, from the perspective of various business stakeholders involved in process modeling, exactly how BPM PS6 supports the end to end process lifecycle. The video centres around a Retail Leasing use case, and follows how Joakim the Business Analyst, Pablo the Process Owner, and James the Process Analyst take the process from conception to runtime, solely through BPM Composer, without the need for IT or the use of JDeveloper.

  • Joakim, the Business Analyst, models the process, designs the user interaction forms, and creates business rules,
  • Pablo, the Process Owner, reviews the process documentation and tests the process using the new ‘Process Player’,
  • James, the Process Analyst, analyses the process and identifies potential bottle necks using ‘Process Simulation’.

Read the full 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.

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Adaptive Case Management Series by Mark Foster

June 20, 2013 Leave a comment

Thanks to Mark Foster from the A-Team. He published a series of Adaptive Case Management articles:

Case Management Part 1: An Introduction by Mark Foster
With the release of PS6 on 1st April, Case Management made its appearance. In this series of blogs Mark intend to

  • introduce the concept of case management
  • explain the anatomy of a case management project in BPM 11g
  • explain the lifecycle of a typical case management project at runtime
  • give pointers as to best practices in the design of a case management project

Case Management Part 1: An Introduction [Read More]

Case Management Part 2: Anatomy of a Project by Mark Foster

In Oracle BPM 11g PS6, BPM Studio (JDeveloper) is the design-time environment for Case Management. This blog entry will describe the make-up of a Case Management project in BPM Studio, stepping through all the terms and properties associated but will stop short of giving recommendations or best-practices, which will follow in a later blog entry.

BPM Studio: Case Management Project Read More.

Case Management Part 3: Runtime Lifecycle of a Project by Mark Foster

Now we understand what Case Management is and the anatomy of an Oracle BPM 11g PS6 Case Management project, we can look at the simplified lifecycle of a project at runtime, how the stakeholder interacts, what happens when a Case Activity is triggered, what happens when it ends etc.

Case Management Runtime Lifecycle Read More.

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.

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BPM mobile worklist demo for iOS

June 17, 2013 2 Comments

Thanks to Manoj you can find a first demo of a BPM mobile worklist at our SOA Community Workspace (SOA Community membership required):

Additional Andrejus Baranovskis our ADF Guru build a Oracle BPM 11g Mobile Worklist with ADF Mobile.

Let us know when you test the demo – we are looking forward to get your feedback!

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.

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An introduction to Oracle Case Management by Leon Smiers

June 14, 2013 Leave a comment

Oracle makes a habit of adding important functionality to minor patch sets. In the recent 11G Release 2 Patch set 6 of Fusion middleware, Oracle has added a milestone in the BPM stack, the Case management functionality. Discussions around this topic had already been going for a while, but finally the first part of it is included in the Fusion Middleware stack.

In this blog I will elaborate its importance and what is contains Since this an important functional addition we will publish more detailed blogs around this topic in the near future.

What functionality is needed for Case Management?
Organizations increasingly need to deal with unstructured processes that Business Process Management Suites are not designed to cope with. Case Management is a way to govern and control these unstructured processes, but Case Management solutions can be challenging to develop.

Developing Case Management around a BPM solution preferably in conjunction with an Enterprise Content Management System solves many of these problems.

What is a case?
A case is a collection of activities that support a specific business objective. Each case has a lifecycle. During that lifecycle there will be a range of activities and requirements; information and content may need to be gathered in a wide range of formats (such as documents, email, minutes, interviews, photos and other data). Throughout there will be process related tasks and actions, human decisions and interventions. At any time in the lifecycle we should be able to have a holistic view of the case, create reports and review audit trails. A case will be subject to organizational policy or procedure, which determines the appropriate outcomes. Read the full 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.

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New case management functionalities in Oracle BPM Suite 11.1.1.7 by Danilo Schmiedel

June 13, 2013 Leave a comment

Today I would like to highlight a nice feature of the newest Oracle BPM Suite Release. I am very happy that Oracle enriched the Suite with certain Case Management functionalities that fit into the existing Service Component Architecture (SCA). In the past month I already had the chance to play a bit with the beta software. With this post I would like to share some of my experiences.

Why Case Management?
Business Process Management becomes more and more important. With BPM Suite processes can be modeled, implemented, simulated and executed in a multi-user environment. There are also a lot of different reports available to monitor processes during runtime. We see in our projects, that this kind of automation is especially valuable for processes which are based on routine work. Some examples are “Hiring”, “Order-to-Cash”, “Order Management”, “Travel Request Management” and so on.

However – we also notice quite a high amount of processes, which are too complex and too flexible to model them in BPMN. We call it knowledge-intensive work. Of course if you have a lot of time you might be able to model almost everything but is it a benefit to have processes which are not readable anymore? How fast is your time-to-market? How easy is it to implement process changes? How can you support the job of the knowledge worker? Some typical domains with a high amount of knowledge-intensive work are Insurances, Banks, Healthcare, Civil Services and Government Agencies.

Let me try to explain the need of case management with our RYLC example. RYLC stands for “Rent your legacy car” and it was introduced in a series of articles as an overall solution example. The main target of RYLC was to explain concepts like service categories, loose coupling, canonical data model, service security and much more (see SOA Spezial magazine for details). The graphic below shows the complete End-to-End RYLC process in BPMN notation from receiving the request, selection of the car, checkout of the vehicle, returning it, creation of the invoice and cash clearance. I highlighted the checkin-part of the process, which covers the return of the car. It is based on an asynchronous message exchange pattern – the process execution stops until the checkin is completed or canceled. In this stage several things can happen.

BPMN Example – Rent your legacy car (RYLC)

The happy path of the process would be that everything goes well and the customer returns the car at the date that has been agreed during the reservation. The extension of the rental period can trigger other actions which are necessary to satisfy the customer. In worst-case the customer might have an accident or somebody steals the car. Read the full article here.

SOA & BPM Partner Community

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BPM 11g JDeveloper IDE PS5 Bug for Process ExecData by Andrejus Baranovskis

June 5, 2013 Leave a comment

I was hitting ugly BPM 11g JDeveloper IDE PS5 bug recently. This bug is strange, because is reproduced just after JDeveloper restart for the working process. Imagine you have valid BPM process, everything works well – restart JDeveloper and suddenly BPM process is corrupted. In my specific scenario I was referencing system attribute from BPM execData – execData object is suddenly lost after JDeveloper restart. I don’t have solution for this yet, just want to share with you the use case for this BPM 11g JDeveloper IDE PS5 bug.
Sample application (SimpleProcess.zip) contains BPM process with one basic Human Task activity: When you create Human Task activity – execData object is available in Data Associations. Read the full 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.

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Insurance SOA & BPM DSS Demo

May 30, 2013 Leave a comment

For access to the Oracle demo systems please visit OPN and talk to your Partner Expert Highlights.
Introduction This demo is a business solution for Insurance domain and showcases how Insurance companies can sell Insurance online. This enables users to quote and buy the policy online. The solution covers the breadth of Fusion Middleware stack. We have WebCenter Spaces for Intranet Site, WebCenter portal application for Customer interfacing site, IDM for Security, SOA/BPM to orchestrate the business use case, UCM as Content Server, OBIEE for reporting and OBIEE Publisher to generate summary pdf reports on the fly. Java Mail Server to relay email messages to customers.

Highlights

  • BPM plays a critical role by providing proactive real-time insight through a flexible real-time decision engine
  • Reduces data entry redundancy and improves quote-to-sale ratios
  • Manages complete process to reduce service cost for end customers
  • Helps businesses to shift from a product-focused to a customer-focused business model
  • Uses MDM for business data and Insbridge for Insurance data capture

Demo Flow Client requests for a quote by entering cover details, employment details, personal details in the alamere portal application. Request quote data is evaluated and decision is taken whether to generate quote or forward the quote for approval before confirming it. Manual approval of the quote by underwriters. Communication between underwriters using BPM Process Spaces. Tracking of the BPM Process instance in Process Spaces. Communication to the client by emails. Buying the Insurance policy by the client. Policy confirmation to the client in the account of the client and through email. For more information and access visit OPN.

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.

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SOA Community Newsletter May 2013

May 29, 2013 Leave a comment

Dear SOA partner community member

Oracle’s fiscal years ends in May – let us know if you need any support to close your SOA or BPM opportunity! We are happy to arrange a conference call or visit with you and your customer. May is the last chance to get a free voucher to be Oracle certified Expert in SOA & BPM!

Together with a team of SOA experts, including Dr. SOA, we publish a 14th articles series about Industrial SOA OTN and the Service Technology Magazine. We are keen to discuss your experience and to
share your best practice, please send us your feedbackTwitter @twitter/soacommunity  #industrialSOA!

Like the past years, we want to bring the Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation home to Europe! Let us know if you want to submit a nomination, we are happy to support it and write a nice quote for you.

This month’s newsletter key topic is Adaptive Case Management (ACM), which is one of the key new features of BPM PS6. Danilo Schniedel, Leon Smiers and Mark Foster published excellent articles about ACM. To get a good impression of BPM PS6 watch the video from the A-Team or attend the on-demand seven Webcasts Series. At our SOA Community Workspace (SOA Community membership required) you can test and BPM iPad mobile worklist demo application.

You can find the latest presentation about Oracle Event Processing PS6 Enhancements & Quick Start Guide to build fast data solution for big data environments also at our Workspace. For Device to Device (D2D) solutions and integrations we published D2D Executive Overview & D2D Value Proposition.

If you want to demo BPM Suite PS6 and SOA Suite PS6 make sure you use the hosted demo services. To get access to the demo environment please contact OPN! At the demo environment you will find a starter kit as well as customizable demos.

Shanny Anoep published an article” What’s new in Oracle SOA Suite 11g R1 PS6”, and Mark Nelson about SOA Version Control. The Amis team published a SOA Suite definitive guide to: The UMS adapter (11.1.1.7). To size your SOA solution we published SOA performance on SPARC T5 benchmark results. Make sure you also use the SOA Suite Tuning Guide for SPARC. A great feature to discover in SOA Suite 11g is the b2b functionality, to learn more attend our b2b training on 21-22 May in Amsterdam.

In the Service Bus section of the newsletter we feature the Fault Handling and Prevention (II) by Ronald van Luttikhuizen & Guido Schmutz and Building OSB projects with Maven and removing the eclipse dependency by Mark Nelson.

Do you want to speak about your success and best practices? Submit your paper for the UKOUG Technology Conference 2013 which will be taking place on 2nd – 4th December at the Manchester Central Convention Complex. For additional call for papers please visit our C4P wiki. Please feel free to add yourself to the conference!

Wish you great success to close all your SOA & BPM opportunities! And thanks for the collaboration & success in fiscal year 2013!

Jürgen Kress
Oracle SOA & BPM Partner Adoption EMEA

To read the newsletter please visit http://tinyurl.com/soanewsMay2013 (OPN Account required)

To become a member of the SOA Partner Community please register at http://www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

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