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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.

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Podcast Show: The State of SOA By Bob Rhubart

June 12, 2013 Leave a comment

Service Oriented Architecture may not get the attention it used to get, but it is still alive and kicking – and more important than ever.

The latest OTN ArchBeat Podcast program features a panel discussion on the State of Service Oriented Architecture. The panel for this conversation consists of four gentlemen who collectively represent exactly half of the team of experts behind Industrial SOA, a new series of articles available on OTN.

The Conversation

Listen to Part 1: The panel discusses why SOA is more important than ever.
Listen to Part 2: The panel discuss SOA in the context of business/IT alignment challenges and shares insight on the differences in SOA approaches between Europe and the US.
Listen to Part 3: (May 8) The panel explains the concept of Industrialized SOA and discusses what it means for Cloud computing, Mobile, Big Data, and other trends.

For further SOA publications please visit our wiki. Please feel free to add your SOA & BPM publications!

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Cloud Computing Book Concepts, Technology & Architecture published by Thomas Erl & Ricardo Puttini

June 11, 2013 1 Comment

During my holiday I read this book, here is my quote “Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture is an excellent resource for IT professionals and managers who want to learn and understand cloud computing, and who need to select or build cloud systems and solutions. It lays the foundation for cloud concepts, models, technologies and mechanisms. As the book is vendor-neutral, it will remain valid for many years. We will recommend this book to Oracle customers, partners and users for their journey towards cloud computing. This book has the potential to become the basis for a cloud computing manifesto, comparable to what was accomplished with the SOA manifesto." Jürgen Kress

Clouds are distributed technology platforms that leverage sophisticated technology innovations to provide highly scalable and resilient environments that can be remotely utilized by organizations in a multitude of powerful ways. To successfully build upon, integrate with, or even create a cloud environment requires an understanding of its common inner mechanics, architectural layers, and models, as well as an understanding of the business and economic factors that result from the adoption and real-world usage of cloud-based services.

In Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture, Thomas Erl, one of the world’s top-selling IT authors, teams up with cloud computing experts and researchers to break down proven and mature cloud computing technologies and practices into a series of well-defined concepts, models, technology mechanisms, and technology architectures, all from an industry-centric and vendor-neutral point of view. In doing so, the book establishes concrete, academic coverage with a focus on structure, clarity, and well-defined building blocks for mainstream cloud computing platforms and solutions.

Subsequent to technology-centric coverage, the book proceeds to establish business-centric models and metrics that allow for the financial assessment of cloud-based IT resources, and their comparison to those hosted on traditional IT enterprise premises. Also provided are templates and formulas for calculating SLA-related quality-of-service values and numerous explorations of the SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS delivery models.

With over 260 figures, 29 architectural models, and 20 mechanisms, this indispensable guide provides a comprehensive education of cloud computing essentials that will never leave your side.

The book is available at Service Tech Books or at Amazon. Looking for additional SOA books or You published a book feel free to add it to our publications wiki!

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SOA Advisory Webcasts: SOA Evaluation & Planning – SOA Diagnostics – SOA Domain setup – Extending SOA Domain

June 10, 2013 Leave a comment

Our global dedicated SOA Support team will run several SOA webcasts, make sure you attend them:

SOA EDG Series – Part I – Evaluation and Planning June 11th 16:00 CET
ADVISOR WEBCAST: Diagnostics Enhancements in SOA Suite 11g PS6 (11.1.1.7) June 25th
SOA EDG Series – Part II – Preparation and Base Domain Setup July 30th 17:00 CET
SOA EDG Series – Part III – Extending the Domain for SOA Products August 20th 17.00 CET

Missed a Webcast on-demand versions are available Oracle Fusion Middleware Advisor Webcast Schedule and Archived Recordings [ID 1456204.1].

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Calling all Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovators Submit your Nominations for the 2013 Oracle Excellence Awards: Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation

June 10, 2013 Leave a comment

Click here, to submit your nomination today!

Have you implemented successful SOA Suite 11g or BPM Suite 11g? Make sure you nominate this customer implementation for the Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation 2013 Awards! We want to bring them again to home, Europe! The nomination should be focused on the customer benefits you achieved with leading edge Oracle Middleware solutions. Let us know if you want a nice quote from us to support your nomination.

Is your organization using Oracle Fusion Middleware to deliver unique business value? If so, let the world know and submit a nomination today for the Oracle Excellence Awards for Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation. These highly in-demand awards honor customers for their cutting-edge solutions using Oracle Fusion Middleware. Winners are selected based on the uniqueness of their business case, business benefits, level of impact relative to the size of the organization, complexity and magnitude of implementation, and the originality of architecture. Winners receive a free pass to Oracle OpenWorld 2013 in San Francisco (September 22-26) and will be honored during a special event at OpenWorld.

Categories include:

To be considered for this award, please complete the Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation nomination form for your specific category and send it to: Innovation-Middleware_us@oracle.com.

NOTE: The deadline to submit all nominations is 5pm Pacific on June 18, 2013.

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Additional new content SOA & BPM Partner Community

June 7, 2013 Leave a comment

SOA Management Manage SOA Suite
AYTS: Summary of The SOA Challenge | Marcel van de Glind
FMW Screencast Program – The New Business Imperative: Social, Mobile, Cloud (Social Media Program) – through June 2013 – OFM Screencast Series
- AIA 11.4 available from March 26th: Includes 1 new pre-built integration option for Product MDM , along with updates to 9 previously released integrations
Fanning Out Events on the Oracle SOA Suite 11g Event Delivery Network
Lucas Jellema shows you how to use events in Oracle SOA Suite 11g to have business processes impact each other in a meaningful way with maximum decoupling. Read it.

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Improve performance and maintenance of heavily used SOA composites by Cattle Crew

June 6, 2013 Leave a comment

As stated in a previous post, heavily used transient BPEL processes should be configured with some well-defined parameters in order to avoid storing too much data in the database, thus optimizing performance.

However, even if BPEL processes inside the composite are configured this way, data of other components like mediators and the composite itself are all stored in the database. How much information is stored can be influenced by the audit level setting. As of documentation, the audit levels are defined as follows:

Off: No composite instance tracking and payload tracking information is collected. No more composite instances can be created. No logging is performed. Note that disabling logging and the display of instances in Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control Console can result in a slight performance increase for processing instances. Instances are created, but are not displayed.
Development: Enables both composite instance tracking and payload detail tracking. However, this setting may impact performance. This level is useful largely for testing and debugging purposes.
Production: Composite instance tracking is collected, but the Oracle Mediator service engine does not collect payload details and the BPEL process service engine does not collect payload details for assign activities (payload details for other BPEL activities are collected). This level is optimal for most normal production operations.

faults Generally, the SOA Infrastructure audit level is set to Production or Development – depending on the environment – and the composites are set to inherit this audit level. In case of an intensively used composite this means that a lot of data is persisted in the database.
The audit level, however, can be overridden for every composite. Since the data from the transient, short-lived composites is not needed, the setting Off for the relevant composite should be an interesting option to consider. Three questions must be answered:

How much information is persisted from the composite instance?
How much information is persisted from the component instances inside the composite?
What happens in case of an error?

Read the full article here.

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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.