10 Replies Latest reply on Sep 7, 2011 3:42 AM by yaziderman

    Is JBpm suitable to my business needs?

    alphabetagamma

      Hi, I have a business process that starts every day morning and completes in the evening. The possible tasks are: Subimit for review, Review and Sign-off. The tasks Submit for review and Review are to be done by the same User group, but should be by different users. Sign-off will be done by Manager role.

      Is JBpm suitable to my needs or would it overkill? The other technologies in the project are Flex, Spring and Hibernate.

        • 1. Re: Is JBpm suitable to my business needs?
          salaboy21

          yes.. it fits well.. you need to analyze if you will include more tasks in the future or another business processes.

          You can use flex, spring and hibernate with jbpm5 as well..

          Cheers

          • 2. Re: Is JBpm suitable to my business needs?
            alphabetagamma

            Thanks for the reply Mauricio. I may not add more tasks. But there is a possibility to add another business process in similar lines. The major concern that we have is how do we control the same User not working on 'Submit for Review' and 'Review' tasks. This can be handled easily in Spring. I am worried if we introduce jBPM for this purpose, isn't it becomes an overhead to maintain?

            • 3. Re: Is JBpm suitable to my business needs?
              salaboy21

              As any framework or platform it has a lot of advantages but it also has a learning curve. It is a trade of between funtionality and amout of time learning the technology. If you think that you application can grow you should definitely take a look at jBPM but if your application will remain small with one or two "business processes" you can just hack the idea of business process and hard code your activities. That's my humble opinion.

              Cheers

              • 4. Re: Is JBpm suitable to my business needs?
                yaziderman

                Dear Friends,

                 

                I have almost a similar case, i need to create customized work flow that would help a group of editors and reviewers to start editing and reviwing documents of different types, in a way that on any time reviewers are able to assign ressources (documents) to the workflow, the initiator is able to monitor the document status on anytime, and this Workflow should be integrated to Alfresco, is Jbpm suitable? 

                • 5. Re: Is JBpm suitable to my business needs?
                  salaboy21

                  Hi Yazid,

                  An old version of the jBPM project was integrated with alfresco already. If you want to only review documents that are stored inside alfresco, that can be easily done with jBPM5 and the new BPMN2 language, but there is no existing integration yet.

                  Cheers

                  • 6. Re: Is JBpm suitable to my business needs?
                    yaziderman

                    Thank you Mauricio,

                    But, does this mean that i have to use older versions to be able to integrate them! or it's not doable! i haven't got the idea about "reviewing documents that are stored inside Alfresco", what do you mean of this?!

                    • 7. Re: Is JBpm suitable to my business needs?
                      salaboy21

                      I think you get it wrong.

                      You can do the integration if you want, but it's not done out of the box right now.

                      Alfresco as far as I understand is a content management repository that allows you to store documents inside it in a JCR repository. If your processes are about reviewing the documents that you store inside the repository you can create your business processes that goes to the repository and work with them.

                      Cheers

                      • 8. Re: Is JBpm suitable to my business needs?
                        yaziderman

                        Ok, then, as an idea of a workflow, it's doable and Jbpm is flexible enough! and i would use the known designer plugins of Eclipse to create the pure Jbpm workflow, right?!

                         

                        Regarding the Integration, is it a matter of deplyment?! the output of the designer is a Jbpm project, in other words a folder with files inside, do you have any idea about the technique to integrate these files in Alfresco?! is there a standard way for integration?!

                        • 9. Re: Is JBpm suitable to my business needs?
                          salaboy21

                          the integration depends on the scenario that you are trying to support.

                          Cheers

                          • 10. Re: Is JBpm suitable to my business needs?
                            yaziderman

                            Ok, more preceisly, my question is:  By default we have 4 or more kinds of pre-built workflows in Alfresco, can we replace this list with our own workflows that we have already created using Jbpm and the graphic designer?! means i don't like to use the Jbpm interface!