Today, Oracle officially announced Oracle BPM Suite 11g. To my knowledge, Oracle BPM Suite 11g is the first and only executable BPMN 2.0-based BPMS available today. I’ve had a chance to try it out, and it is really impressive. The product provides a united runtime environment for both BPEL and native BPMN 2.0, uniting two previously distinct BPMS offerings.
I expected a minimal implementation of BPMN, but Oracle far surpassed those expectations. They support all the important event types – message, timer, error, signal – including boundary events (interrupting and non-interrupting) and event subprocesses, so they have really set a high bar for other vendors who will claim BPMN 2.0 support later this year. They also have great business rule and BAM integration, and a configurable end user mashup environment called Process Spaces that supports team collaboration and “social BPM.” If you want to find out more, I wrote a white paper about it, which you can download here.
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Bruce,
How easy is the development of complex custom screens with the new Oracle Suite?
Peter
Peter,
BPM and SOA suites leverage Oracle’s Application Development Framework (ADF) for custom UI development. ADF provides almost too many features and capabilities to support the development of complex custom screens…..
(the list of demo’s below show what is possible with ADF and are available from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/jdev/viewlet-097827.html#adf)
Rich Internet Applications (RIA) with JSF (Online Demos)
Oracle ADF Faces Rich Client Components Quick Overview
ADF Faces Rich Client Runtime Capabilities
Oracle ADF Data Visualizations: Graph Interactivity
Oracle ADF Data Visualizations: Maps, Gauges and Pivot Tables
Oracle ADF Data Visualizations: The Hierarchical Viewer New
ADF Faces Rich Client Development Experience
cheers,
Matt
Hi Bruce,
As regards the cost, does the BPM suite include SOA Suite also or is it a separate license?
Cheers,
I think so but not sure. That’s a question for Oracle.
Have anyone actually go through all the BPMN 2.0 elements on the tool? After trying it, I found that not all event types (BPMN 2.0) are available on the tool. In addition the human tasks are done quite differently from the BPMN 2.0 standard “user task”. There are extended user task type which is not part of BPMN 2.0. And the ‘internal process behaviour’ of the extended user task type is not visible on the bpmn model itself.
Any comment or am I doing / using the wrong tool?
In BPMN the “process” logic is standardized but task implementations are not. Oracle has a particular way of doing userTask implementations as they are done in BPEL, i.e. the userTask invokes a service that manages the task delivery and completion status. That seems like a valid BPMN 2.0 implementation to me. I think what you mean by the extended part is that approval flows can be done internally to the task, so there is some “process” logic defined inside the task instead of in the BPMN. Esthetically I am not a big fan of this either, but I have no doubt that it works.
Tahnks, Bruce. Yes IMO this is a drift away from the BPMN norm, which is if it is available on BPMN standard, it should not be moved into the implementation layer. If model portability is one of the BPMN 2.0 objective, then my concern is that this type of variation would handicap the ‘portability’ of BPMN model or more specifically BPMN 2.0 objective. Apart from the approval task, there are several other types of process that are implemented as types of human task, including FYI task, management task and so forth. Embedding the implementation out of BPMN would caused one of the fundamental issue to BPM that is the ability to have flexible process design and hence achieving an agile business design.
On top of that, there are several types ‘event’ not available as well. To name a few, ‘multiple event’, ‘escalation event’, ‘compensation event’. The missing gateway type (BPMN 2.0) from the tool is the ‘parallel event-based gateway’. The ‘pool’ element is also not used in the tool.
The up side is that it has the new ‘business rule task’. As a practitioner, my concern is the variation of BPMN 2.0 in between the tools would make adoption harder and greater learning curves in the business.
I don’t think you give them enough credit. It is one thing for a pure modeling tool to support 100% of the spec, but quite another for a BPMS. At this point I think Oracle supports more of the full BPMN 2.0 palette than any other BPMS. For instance, I’m not sure any other BPMS vendor supports Signal, and Business Rule Task ties in nicely with their built-in rule engine. I think we’ll be waiting a long time for compensation events from any BPMN 2.0 runtime.
Bruce. Yes Oracle is definitely the first to have included the ‘business rule task’ hence the first to have implemented some of BPMN 2.0 elements and not the first as claimed to implemented BPMN 2.0. On the points related to other event types, there is a handful of other BPMS on the market that have included ‘signals’ and ‘compensation’ events as part of the BPMN elements. In conclusion, I am just being caution when a tool claims to have implemented BPMN 2.0 rather than clearly stating only implemented some elements of BPMN 2.0.
Just curious, but who is doing BPMN 2.0 transaction recovery? I had not heard of that.
BPMN 1.2 compensate event, not the 2.0. Happy to send you on private email on that.
There seems to be a lot put into 11g. Does being so full featured come with performance challenges? Has it been tested for volume/scale etc?