Well, sort of… By that I mean you can export a BPMN diagram from your Blueprint account to your desktop and import it into another BPMN tool, like Process Modeler for Visio, the tool I use in my BPMessentials training, or BizAGI (see screenshot).
After months of my nagging Lombardi about the need for this, it popped up like a surprise gift in the July Blueprint release. You might think they always had this. Not really. Notwithstanding Forrester’s swooning over Blueprint’s BPDM export feature, that never really worked. The one that does work is based on XPDL 2.1, which has emerged as the interchange format of choice for BPMN 1.x. Robert Shapiro and I are working on the portability conformance levels in XPDL 2.2, which supports BPMN 2.0, and we welcome Lombardi’s commitment to BPMN model portability between tools.
There is a small problem getting lanes to interchange properly with Process Modeler for Visio. I am trying to get ITP to debug that for me and then I will post the minor xslt tweak needed to go between Blueprint and Process Modeler for Visio. This is key for me as I am committed to BPMN training on both tool platforms. Kudos to Lombardi for making it happen.
I ran a small test to move a process from BluePrint to Fujitsu Interstage BPM which was successful.
See: http://kswenson.wordpress.com/2009/07/13/xpdl-fully-tipped/
Bruce,
In our testing, we’ve had to use XSL to make minor tweaks to add non-required or deprecated elements to the XPDL output so that it can be read by tools from several other vendors. We’ve put the XSL stylesheets for both ITP and BizAgi on our community site at http://drop.io/lombardiblueprint. Feel free to check them out there and/or contribute back any other changes you’ve made.
Dave