A few days ago, Oracle released BPM Suite 11.1.1.5 Feature Pack, which includes many new features, bug fixes and performance improvements.

Some of the most important new features:

• Improved Business Process Composer (snapshot support, enhanced sharing and collaboration, improved ease of use)
• New Business Analyst features (report generation, BPMN 2.0 collaboration view)
• Advanced Service Integration (Support for BPMN Correlation and Conversation)
• Richer Human Workflow
• Improved Process Analytics (Round-trip simulations, Improved BI integration)
• Several improvements for developers (Draft-mode, Custom logging, Rule test framework, Enhanced rule audit trail, Workspace customization, BPM API javadoc available)
• And more…

For more info, please refer to: What’s new in BPM Suite 11g R1 PS 4Feature Pack

BPM Suite 11.1.1.5 feature pack  is intended to use for BPM customers only!

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Throughout July Packt Publishing (one of the leading publishers in Oracle books) will be celebrating the release of its 50^th Oracle book.

To mark this milestone Packt is offering the following discounts:

• 20% off all Oracle print books
• 30% off all Oracle eBooks

Packt first started publishing Oracle books in 2006, and has since published best-sellers such as Getting Started With Oracle SOA Suite 11g R1 – A Hands-On Tutorial, Oracle Coherence 3.5 and Oracle Fusion Middleware Patterns.  And with more than 20 exciting new Oracle titles scheduled for 2011 this current success is only set to increase.

Packt owes much of its success to its print-on-demand mantra which not only allows it to produce books on specialist areas, but enables a quick response to new developments in technology – which was recently demonstrated with Packt publishing the first ever book on GoldenGate, the Oracle GoldenGate 11g Implementer’s guide.

Packt’s entire range of Oracle books is also available via PacktLib, Packt’s Online Library, and as part of Packt’s celebrations it’s offering you the chance to win a year’s subscription to PacktLib worth $220 click here for details: http://www.packtpub.com/article/50th-oracle-book-offer.

I would also like to take the opportunity to promote the book  WS-BPEL 2.0 for SOA Composite Applications with Oracle SOA Suite 11g which was written by two members of our team (Matjaz B. Juric and Marcel Krizevnik).

For further information on this, and other books published by Packt Publishing, please visit www.PacktPub.com.

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Last week on July 6-8, 2011, three members of our team have attended Best Student Recognition Event, held in IBM innovation center in La Gaude, France. Along with more than seventy students from all over Europe, Middle East and Africa, we were given a unique opportunity to hear from IBM executives and experts on IBM Smarter Planet strategy, their innovative solutions and technologies.

IBM BSRE 2011 all participants

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ODTUG KScope11 conference has started this Monday in Long Beach, CA. Our team is represented at the conference with two presentations:

• SCA and SDO in SOA
• Business Activity Monitoring Unleashed

More about the conference: http://www.kscope11.com/

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Our book WS-BPEL 2.0 for SOA Composite Applications with Oracle SOA Suite 11g has been published as Kindle Book.

This is our first book published for Kindle. Try it out!

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In last spring, our cloud computing center took part in IBM WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance V2.0 Beta Program, where we got to know and experience first-handed IBMs hardware appliance, which dispenses and manages IBM middleware to virtualized servers and private cloud computing environments. Our practical experience confirmed that CloudBurst Appliance (CBA) offers powerful and very easy to use graphical interface for configuring and deploying single-instance or clustered virtual environments running WebSphere Application Servers (WAS) or Process Servers (WPS).

IBM CloudBurst Appliance

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As an attempt to ease the application’s development in terms of packaging, versioning and deployment, Java 7 will introduce Java Module System (JMS). The Java Module System is being developed under the Java Community Process as JSR 277. The abbreviation itself does not seem very appropriate at first sight, as it can be easily confused with JMS (Java Message Service).

Java Module System’s architecture consists of three main components:

• Java module
• Versioning System
• Repository

Java Module System is a new distribution standard which (similar as JAR file) contains a set of classes and other resources. However, JMS differs from JAR in that the modules can be versioned. A module can be defined as a logical unit of a set of files, resources and other dependencies that can be versioned, packaged and deployed in the module repository. The module repository is where java modules can be stored, discovered and used by other modules.

You can read more about JMS at the following link: http://www.javabeat.net/articles/101-introduction-to-java-module-system-in-java-70-1.html

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It has finally happened what we were all anxious anticipating and speculating about. IBM announced how they will unify their SOA BPM platform in the upcoming version. During the IBM Impact 2011 conference in Las Vegas (April 10-13) main attention was focused right on unified IBM BPM-SOA platform called IBM Business Process Manager (IBM BPM).

So what was is going on and how will the new platform look like? Which products are staying which will be deprecated? How the terminology will be shifted? What is new for the WPS users and what is new for the WLE users? What this means for existing deployments, how will they be migrated? How was the integration of the Process Server and Lombardi Edition process runtime unified? How will the Lombardi and Process Server processes interact? How will we design business processes and integrations in the future?

So a lot of questions are arising from IBM announcement. We will be trying to answer them in this and fallowing blog posts.

What is going on is that basically IBM is taking existing WebSphere products that were rather independent and integrating them in unified platform. Fragmentation of products happened in the past as a result of the acquisitions; remember Lombardi and ILOG for now.

WebSphere Lombardi Edition and WebSphere Process Server were finally integrated in a new platform called IBM Business Process Manager (IBM BPM). The unification objectives were to provide platform that will be simple, powerful, enable governance and visibility. Did they make it; did they create the most powerful BPM platform on the planet?

Definitely Lombardi Edition and Processes Server were best-of-breed and the upcoming integration of both will have impact on the BPMS ecosystem. IBM is shifting his strategy to more business-centric from rather to developer-centric and this helped him to unify its products in a more BPM friendly manner. Big role in this shift are playing Lombardi tools which became the core of the new platform.

IBM Business Process Manager has so many capabilities that it will be available in three different configurations (Express, Standard, and Advanced). All tools previously existing in different products are now available as one product. Company could choose appropriate configuration matching stage of their BPM program.

Did this unification impacted terminology? IBM is mainly dropping WebSphere prefix for their BPM tools. We will be designing processes in Process Designer (IPD) and designing not developing integrations in Integration Designer (IID). Designed processes will then run on the Process Server. More examples of the new terms can be spotted in the table below.

How all these “new” products constitute IBM Process Manager Platform? The main piece of platform is rather new (to WPS users) and it is called Process Center (WLE users should be familiar with it). It acts as a central BPM repository for the processes, services and related artifacts like Business objects (XSD) and Service Interfaces (WSDL). Process Center enables centralized governance of the BPM. This means that managing of the process life cycle through versioning and deployment will be carried out in Process Center.

While Process Center represent central repository of the processes it also has information about server environment. This enables publishing processes directly to the Process Server from Process Center. It has capabilities to define test, staging and production environments.

Users using Process Designer or Integration Designer will collaborate through Process Center. While Process Designer as known from Lombard has active connection to repository, the Integration Designer connection is passive. This means that synchronization with the central repository has to be made on regular intervals with build-in sync mechanisms.

Process Designer has all of the capabilities with look and feel from WebSphere Lombardi AE and the same is true for Integrations Designer and its predecessor WebSphere Integration Developer. Processes designed in the Process Designer are called Business Process Definitions (BPD), obviously these are “Lombardi“ BPMN processes. On the other hand, processes could still be designed in Integration Designer, this processes are now called Straight- Through Processes (STP) and are BPEL processes. Integration in the means of using services (processes) from one type of process in another is done via SCA and we will talk about this integration in the fallowing posts.

What is very important is the new shared runtime environment for all types of processes. BPD and BPMN share the same runtime called Process Server which is based on WebSphere Process Server. IBM process runtime environment now supports execution of the BPMN and BPEL processes.

For monitoring capabilities of the both types of processes Business Monitor is used. This is enabled with shared Process Server runtime that is emitting business events for Business Monitor. While for Business Rules one product is used for whole platform and that is ILOG JRules. It is integrated into Process Designer and Integration Designer.

What is praiseworthy is that backward compatibility will be maintained with easy migration of existing solutions. It was stated that no changes has been made to the execution engine. We all hope that this will work well.

To quickly summarize in practice there is not so lot of changes to the look and feel of the products. They have been renamed and integration capabilities have been implemented to seamlessly work with other products in the platform.

In the fallowing blog posts we will further investigate what is new in IBM Business Process Manager 7.5 on the areas of:

• Platform Configurations
• Installation and Configuration
• Business Process Shared Repository
• Integration of Process Designer and Integration Designer
• Business Process Versioning
• Human Tasks and User Experience
• Business Rules
• Environment Migration
• Registry Integration with ESB
• Business Process Monitoring
• Dynamic invocation

While doing that we will try to answer all the remaining questions.

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Our team gained new competences at IBM’s Impact 2011 conference! Matej Hertiš was recognized as IBM Certified Solution Advisor for Cloud Computing and Martin Potočnik was recognized as IBM Certified SOA Associate.

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