Friday, May 9, 2008

AquaLogic BPM Suite 6.1 and AquaLogic Service Bus 3.0

Since the release of AquaLogic Service Bus 3.0 (ALSB) we have been getting questions about AquaLogic BPM Suite (ALBPM) support for it. As you may have seen in the past 18 months we went from having a manual process to integrate process services and the bus, to a fully automated point-and-click approach to consume and publish services between the two products. We have also implemented a custom transport to allow for better performance when ALBPM and ALSB are co-deployed in the same JVM. The transport works with RMI over T3 and bypass the typical web services call cycle, improving performance. Running inside WebLogic Server you get one of the most robust and scalable infrastructure available to power any SOA initiative.

For AquaLogic BPM Suite 6.1, we have updated the integration to be fully compliant with ALSB 3.0. We have also re-implemented the custom transport to take advantage of the latest improvements in the bus architecture. One brand new feature was extending pub-sub support to include BPEL processes, which was only available for XPDL previously.

Below is quick snapshot of ALBPM 6.1 processes being published into the ALSB server - this can be done from Studio or from our Enterprise server in case you were wondering how one can account for changes in the environment from development, qa, and production.

alsb3_01_trim

Next is a snapshot showing a BPEL process being injected inside ALSB from ALBPM. Everything is fully automated and it is just point-and-click. We try to make as simple as possible for ALBPM to support orchestration use-cases where processes exposed as services can leverage the bus infrastructure, and the advanced flows can be easily composed in Studio.

bpm_01

If you are coming to BEA Participate 2008 next week we have some good live demonstrations and a hands-on lab area dedicate to give you full exposure to the new features. There are 8 labs where you get to play with all the cool new features. Including the latest integration between ALBPM and ALSB.

As I mentioned in the previous blog for those of you looking for more frequently updates (when a blog is not enough), you may consider following my updates at Twitter. There you can get daily updates on product related features, sneak preview data, you may also get some unrelated noise from time to time. Below is my feed just in case:

This is it for now, will continue to post updates about ALBPM 6.1 here so be sure to come back!

Cheers,

--alex

 

 

Technorati tags:   SOA ESB

Monday, May 5, 2008

AquaLogic BPM Suite 6.1 & Outlook 2007

Just last week someone asked me for a screen shot demonstrating how BPM information from ALBPM WorkSpace 6.1 can be exposed via RSS inside Microsoft Outlook 2007.

I thought I had already posted this before... However, when I went back to my blogs I noticed that I had talked about the support, but I did not provide an example. Well, no need to wait any longer, check it out below:

ALBPM61_RSS_Outlook07

On the left-panel you can see the Outlook RSS Feeds folder - part of the main navigation tree structure. From there, we have added the BPM RSS feed as a new feed to the list - just a few clicks. Next, as process instances becomes available from the WorkSpace, they will show up in the feed stream. Users can select from the list panel on the right side and see the instance detail in the view panel below.

This is a simple way to integrate ALBPM 6.1 not only with Outlook 2007, but also with MS SharePoint, Atlassian Confluence, and other portal touch point that can consume RSS. In addition, in ALBPM 6.1 we will also provide a plug-in to Office 2007 - see previous post for more info.

Before I forget we are just a week away from Participate 2008, hope to see you there!

Talk to you soon,

--alex

 

 

Technorati tags:  Outlook Office