Oracle BPM Goes Mobile Demonstration

July 18, 2014 Leave a comment

  • The BPM Workspace mobile application is now available – iTunes
  • You can approve, reject, assign and delegate tasks, perform bulk operations, view and edit task details, and add comments and attachments. You can add attachments from your device or use its built in camera to take a photo and attach it to a task.
  • The ability to continue to work offline is supported for when your device is disconnected. Task updates are automatically synchronized with the server as soon as it becomes available.
  • Demonstration Video – YouTube BPMMobile.pptx (At our SOA Community Workspace – SOA Community membership required)
  • Demo Instructions  BPM Demo iPad.doc (At our SOA Community Workspace – SOA Community membership required)
  • Server Requirement: PS6BP (patch number 18072286)
  • Device Requirement: This app is currently certified for iOS7 and not compatible with older versions. Not officially certified for iPad mini, but it should work

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IDC Releases the MarketScape Worldwide Business Process Platforms Vendor Assessment 2014 report

July 17, 2014 Leave a comment

This IDC MarketScape focuses on 10 choices for business process (BP) platforms, which are product suites or portfolios that support the design and runtime environments for business process automation. BP platforms support the most sophisticated requirements of enterprises focused on a variety of initiatives that range from operational excellence to strategic growth through the delivery of innovative digital services.
Oracle is a leader with Oracle BPM Suite 11g
Other leaders include IBM, Tibco, Pegasystems and OpenText

Report Findings

Note: Pegasystems is an important vendor in business process platforms and was invited to participate in our assessment, although we were unable to do a full product evaluation of the company’s current release. For that reason, we marked Pegasystems’ position on the IDC MarketScape graphic in flat gray.
IDC also created another group of leaders called disruptive innovators. These vendors have
products and product strategies that demonstrate innovation leadership by pushing the
envelope of process automation in ways that broaden adoption and change the types of
projects enterprises are able to do. The disruptive innovators, identifiable by their right-most
position in Figure 1, are TIBCO, K2, Bosch Software Innovations, and Bizagi.
IDC classifies the hundreds of features of BP platforms into 13 categories:

  • Discovery and design
  • Process modeling
  • Mobile
  • User interface and standard runtime workspace
  • Work management
  • Task management
  • Social/collaboration environment
  • Case management
  • Search
  • Data access and integration
  • Decision automation
  • Visibility and reporting
  • Life-cycle management

This IDC MarketScape looks at offerings that support midrange to complex deployment patterns.
Complexity is found in many different elements of process automation.

ORACLE SUMMARY
Oracle is a Leader in our IDC MarketScape for BP platforms. Its product balances between traditional
BPM offerings and some of the more disruptive approaches offered by newer entrants in this market.
Where Oracle’s portfolio stands out is in the sophistication of its capabilities to extend the use of BPM
beyond an employee-only focus as well as its mobile capabilities. Customers of Oracle applications are likely candidates to use the BPM features to extend capabilities. Oracle BPM Suite is also successfully used as a standalone platform for custom process automation.
Product capabilities were scored for developer capabilities, business capabilities, overall architecture,
and value per feature delivered. The BP platform vendors are all high-quality offerings, and Oracle
scored at the top of all measures in aggregate. Oracle had top scores for mobile capabilities, process
modeling, work management, and social features. It also had high architecture scores in multiple
categories.

Strengths
Key product strengths include:
-Oracle provides support of mobile devices from within the development environment.
Customers have multiple ways to handle mobile, such as a responsive style of viewing forms
and support of hybrid mobile environments through ADF.
-Oracle has made significant improvements in work management, especially with the
integration of federated identity to extend process participation in processes to nonemployees,
such as business partners and customers.
-With the introduction of case management, Oracle provides a well-rounded portfolio of
products used for business process automation covering most deployment scenarios.

Challenges
Key product challenges include:
-Oracle BPM Suite is dependent on the Oracle stack. To get the richness Oracle showed in its
demo, users are required to implement WebLogic. In addition, BPM Suite 11g requires Oracle
Database. While Oracle offers open source alternatives, such as Glassfish as an application
server and MySQL as a database, its BPM product doesn’t support these alternatives. Non-
Oracle customers will find it challenging to adopt Oracle BPM because of its dependency on
the underlying infrastructure.
-Oracle does not have a BPM cloud offering yet, but it is on Oracle’s road map.
-While an increasing number of elements can be configured onscreen, Oracle is a complex
product portfolio to master. In a market where business stakeholders influence deals, Oracle’s
developer orientation makes it more difficult to sell than other business-focused offerings.

Guidance Summary
Oracle has a strong and comprehensive portfolio of BPM offerings. Oracle is well suited for enterprises
that need to:
-Extend the functionality of packaged applications, particularly those offered by Oracle
-Improve management of end-to-end processes using operational intelligence techniques
-Create reusable business services and composite applications
-Employ a strategic business platform for transformation and business process reengineering initiatives
[Source: IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Business Process Platforms 2014 Vendor Assessment – Maureen Fleming, Jeff Silverstein – April 2014] Get the full report from IDC

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Charity skydive – Please sponsor Matthew to save a Rhino

July 16, 2014 Leave a comment

In the last years we supported also our middleware business in Africa. We had an excellent SOA Blackbelt training there with attendees all over the world. Hospitality was wonderful and we also enjoyed the nature. This year I event back for a private holiday and I saw how Rhinos got poached. Therefore we would to publish this private message from Alistair sun and ask you to support him:

My son, Matthew, and I are doing a sponsored skydive for the Save the Rhino foundation charity – from 2 miles up! I must be mad…………
clip_image001As you may know, Rhino poaching is at an all time high in Africa. In 2013, there were recorded to be 1004 Rhino poached in South Africa alone. However by the end of June 2014, that figure is already at 596. That is one Rhino being poached a staggering every 8 hours!! Unfortunately this wonderful, prehistoric animal is now critically endangered and runs the risk of being extinct! We’re passionate about conservation (Matthew is off to South Africa to work on a game reserve next year) so we’re doing a skydive for charity in mid August in Oxfordshire. A £5 donation can help to raise state of the art equipment to fight the poachers. But most importantly it helps to raise funds to teach locals that it is so much better to save these animals, rather than harvest them! If you can find the smallest amount of money, even 50p, to donate, then your help will be gratefully appreciated by us and the Rhino! Photos etc will be posted of the skydive to prove we have done it, and for everyone to have a right laugh at us! You can donate quickly and easily here https://www.justgiving.com/Matthew-Hopkins6/
Donating through JustGiving is simple, fast and totally secure. Your details are safe with JustGiving – they’ll never sell them on or send unwanted emails. Once you donate, they’ll send your money directly to the charity. So it’s the most efficient way to donate – saving time and cutting costs for the charity. Thanks everyone! Alistair Hopkins

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Wrong timezone causes TopLink warning in SOA Suite by Cato Aune

July 16, 2014 1 Comment

From time to time we discovered SOA installations that got this little TopLink warning in the SOA server log every minute:

It happened on some installations, but not on other, and we couldn’t really find any patterns that explained why it did happen on installation A and not on installation B.
After some investigation and with help from Oracle Support, we found that it was a combination of a JDBC bug and that sometimes strange things just happens.

  • In the table mediator_containerid_lease, there is a timestamp with timezone column.
  • For some strange reason, the JVM believed that the timezone was Atlantic/Jan_Mayen, and used the code for Atlantic/Jan_Mayen in the timestamp with timezone column.
  • A bug in the JDBC driver (or some inconsistency between driver versions and DB versions) made method extractTimeZone in TIMESTAMPHelper class get a NULL result instead of the correct timezone.

Solution: Read the complete article here.

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SOA Suite 11g Basics – Configuring multiple email addresses for use in BPEL email activity by Carsten Wiesbaum

July 15, 2014 Leave a comment

soa-infra Workflow PropertiesWhen working on Oracle SOA Suite 11g solutions one might have the requirement to send out emails on various occasions. Within Oracle Fusion Middleware this capability is provided by the User Messaging Service (UMS) infrastructure. Nevertheless, some additional configuration is required in order to send emails from within a SOA composite application. This is especially true if one has to send emails from several email addresses. This article will describe how to setup SOA infrastructure in order to send emails from within BPEL processes using the email activity. The following topics will be covered:

  • Enable email communication channel
  • Configure Default email account
  • Configure additional email account using Enterprise Manager MBean Browser

This article will not cover setting up the required email server, general UMS configuration and sending mails using BPEL email activity.

Enable email communication channel and configuring Default email account

Even if UMS is setup properly, some additional steps are required in order to send emails from within BPEL processes. First of all, the workflow engine email communication channel has to be enabled. The configuration is executed within Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g. To begin with one has to enter EM, expand the SOA folder and open soa-infra context menu. Within the context menu Workflow Properties can be accessed. Read the complete article here.

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BPEL and BPM’s performance monitoring using DMS by Sylvain Grosjean

July 14, 2014 Leave a comment

What is DMS ?
The Dynamic Monitoring Service (DMS) API allows you to add performance instrumentation to Weblogic Server and Fusion Middleware (BPM, BPEL, Rules, OSB, Human Tasks, B2B…). During runtime DMS collects performance information, called DMS metrics that developers, system administrators, and support analysts use to help analyse system performance or monitor system status.
These performance metrics captured by DMS are available via the Spy Servlet and via MBeans.

BPEL/BPM Threading Model’s Review :

Dispatcher system Threads : allocated to process system dispatcher messages.
Dispatcher invoke Threads : (synchronous invoke) allocated to process synchonous requests, For each payload received, the thread will instantiate a new instance invocations.
Dispatcher Engine Threads : (asynchronous activities : receive in mid-process, on Alarm, onMessage, wait) accolated to process asynchronous messages (durable process).

We can tune these values through OEM : Read the complete article here.

SOA & BPM Partner Community

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Upgrading to Oracle SOA Suite 11g PS6 (11.1.1.7)? Do this. By Ahmed Aboulnaga & Harold Dost

July 13, 2014 Leave a comment

Do you need to make any code changes after applying the Oracle SOA Suite 11g PS6 (11.1.1.7) patchset?
Yes, this upgrade requires a few code modifications. So search for the following terms in your code to see if you are affected:

  • setProperty
  • out.header.wsse_Security

Issue 1: setProperty function requires strings now

If you are using the setProperty function, you need to force the variable to be a string.
After the 11.1.1.7 patchset, this no longer works:
select=’mhdr:setProperty("out.property.replyToAddress",$ReplyToAddress)’
Instead, force the variable into a string, in this example $ReplyToAddress:
select=’mhdr:setProperty("out.property.replyToAddress",string($ReplyToAddress))’/>
Read the complete article here.

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Using Split-Joins in OSB Services for parallel processing of messages. By Rutger Van Iperen

July 12, 2014 Leave a comment

For-Each settingsThe Split-Join can be a very useful tool in your OSB services yet seems to be underestimated. When I did some asking around it turned out not many developers use this, even though I can come up with plenty of uses for the Split-Join. The Split-Join’s strength is in numbers, meaning it is the most powerful when you need to process a lot of pieces of similar data. For this example I used a simplified version of a project I am working on. In this project mobile devices are set to send data about rainfall to a database. The data is collected at a regular interfal creating a record and sent to the database per session which contains a large set of records. Instead of processing these records one at time I can process them concurrently and save a lot of processing (and waiting) time.

I created the XML Schema files and WSDL’s for the two services using JDeveloper and not Eclipse/OEPE because its design interface for these files is a lot more userfriendly (although this is of course personal preference). Read the complete article here.

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OSB, Service Callouts and OQL – Part 1 by Vijay Kumar

July 11, 2014 2 Comments

Oracle Fusion Middleware customers use Oracle Service Bus (OSB) for virtualizing Service endpoints and implementing stateless service orchestrations. Behind the performance and speed of OSB, there are a couple of key design implementations that can affect application performance and behavior under heavy load. One of the heavily used feature in OSB is the Service Callout pipeline action for message enrichment and invoking multiple services as part of one single orchestration. Overuse of this feature, without understanding its internal implementation, can lead to serious problems.
This post will delve into OSB internals, the problem associated with usage of Service Callout under high loads, diagnosing it via thread dump and heap dump analysis using tools like ThreadLogic and OQL (Object Query Language) and resolving it. The first section in the series will mainly cover the threading model used internally by OSB for implementing Route Vs. Service Callouts.

OSB Pipeline actions for Service Invocations

A Proxy is the inbound portion of OSB that can handle the incoming request, transform/validate/enrich/manipulate the payload before invoking co-located or remote services. The execution logic is built using the proxy pipeline actions. For executing the remote (or even local) business service, OSB provides three forms of service invocations within a Proxy pipeline:

  • Route – invoke a single business service endpoint with (or without) a response. This happens entirely at end of a proxy service pipeline execution and bridges the request and response pipeline. The route can be treated as the logical destination to reach or final service invocation. There can be only one Route action (there can be choices of Route actions – but only one actual execution) in a given Proxy execution.
  • Publish – invoke a business service without waiting for result or response (like 1-way). The caller does not care much about the response. Just interested in sending out something (and ensuring it reaches the other side).
  • Service Callout – invoke one or more business service(s) as part of message augmentation or enrichment or validation but this is not the primary business service for a given Proxy, unlike the Route action. The service callouts can be equivalent to credit card validation, address verification while Route is equivalent to final order placement. There can be multiple Service Callouts inside a Proxy pipeline. Read the complete article here.

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OSB 11g – A Hands-on Tutorial by Sivakumar Gonugunta

July 10, 2014 2 Comments

I published a OSB11g tutorial considering the use case described in my earlier blog posts. The tutorial can be accessed from here as I am not sure on how to place it in OTN. I would like to know your valuable comments on this. The WSDLs and other material used in this tutorial can be downloaded from here.

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