1. Strong storms, highly unusual for October, that got many of us completely drenched
2. Earthquake, which though not very severe was eerie coming 4 days before the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta quake
3. BPM !!

BPM was featured very prominently in both Thomas Kurian's keynote and Hasan Rizvi's general session "Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Foundation for Innovation."

Mark Peterson writes Oracle spotlights BPM in Fusion Middleware Story :

During the Oracle Open World 2009 General Session "Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Foundation for Innovation" we heard about SOA, the Enterprise 2.0 Portal and Tuxedo; but what is that? We were given a demo of the new Oracle BPM 11g application development environment. We got to see swim-lanes, process models, simulations and dash-boards. They showed how you can obtain process model metrics and key performance indicators for your process. They made significant improvements over the way BPM integrates with applications and systems.

We also saw significant customer interest - our sessions and labs were well attended and well received, our demo pods were heavily visited, and many of us had back-to-back customer meetings throughout OOW.

In addition to the positive feedback we received in person, many have blogged positively - following is a quick compilation:

Jim Sinur writes Oracle BPM 11g R1 Suite is Well Thought Through:

Oracle wants to engage the business user in BPM. With that as goal, Oracle has set out to have a more business friendly BPM experience at several levels. First the modeling environment is greatly improved, secondly the BAM environment is usable plus somewhat seamless and finally the integrated rules environment is finally usable by non-IT types.
...
If Oracle BPM 11g R1 works as advertised (to be determined), Oracle is ahead of the other power vendors.

Mark Peterson writes the wait was worth it:

For businesses, the need for a rich user-experience has been achieved. The BPM studio is integrated with the ADF development environment; a JSF-based technology. ...
BPM 11g has also improved on the type of roles available for activities. You can now specify interactive tiers for approval or review activities. ...
BPM 11g has many other features as well. It has a state-of-the-art rules engine. It can handle most business rules and conditional requirements without the need to integrate third-party rules engines. It has a new milestone activity switch to enhance business activity monitoring and instance processing by the workspace. It also has integrated Oracle BAM to enhance the ability to obtain information about the business process.

Jason Jones writes based on the hands-on-lab:

The result is an impressive combination of Oracle's latest SOA technologies with the business process modeling...
Another impressive feature is Process Composer, which is a lightweight web-based modeler to modify processes for less technical users...

Todd Biske provides an excellent summary of the BPM 11 session:

Overall, the message is that Oracle has a comprehensive and unified BPM platform. From the slides, it certainly appears comprehensive. The 11g release is all about unification onto a common platform, and as long as what's been on the slides accurately reflects this new platform, 11g should be a good step forward for Oracle BPM.

Mike Van Alst writes:

Always good to go out with a bang, so I've saved the best for last. With the introduction of BPM 11g comes the Process Composer. This is an web-based tool aimed at the business users, where they are able to modify any process before it's deployed. Based on available rules, services and process activities, they can modify the process to their needs. This will make imtroduction of new products (based on a default process) an undertaking that can be handled purely by the business, without the need for IT.

To sum it up, in Mark Peterson's words - the wait was worth it!

We broke down the presentation by following themes:

Business User Empowerment
What we are finding is that many of our customers are beginning to require business to specify their processes at greater detail and with more precise semantics as well as to capture the metrics that they want to measure, monitor, and analyze.

To facilitate, business getting into the driver seat we have been making significant enhancements:

Business friendly BPMN 2.0 modeling and simulation to enable business analysts to easily and graphically create BPMN 2.0 process models, define the organizational model supporting it including roles and calendars, to create various simulation scenarios and run them, and to define business indicators and metrics.

While business friendliness of these tools is important, equally important is the support for BPMN 2.0 standard. In BPMN 2.0, for the first time we have a standard that not only enables business to model processes with precise semantics but also can be executed without any translations. We have seen that standards facilitate skill development and foster adoption and we strongly believe and our customers agree that BPMN 2.0 will address the issue of what skills business needs to have to get into the BPM driver seat.

Business user empowerment also requires that business be able to author and manage the policies and rules surrounding the process. In this regard, we have significantly enhanced business rules authoring including adding support for Decision Tables, a spreadsheet like metaphor that is easy to visualize and conceptualize and also supports overlap and completeness tests.

The other features in this context are:

• Zero-code IT development environment, leveraging the SOA composite editor, that enables an IT person to leverage the breadth of Oracle's SOA capabilities and expose them to business analysts in a business friendly catalog
• Rich forms leveraging ADF that not only provides a visual design environment but also allows composing data from multiple sources including back-end applications, BI, etc. and render them using highly interactive UI and visualization elements. Also, for those who do not want to do any UI work we automatically generate 100% ready to use forms.
• BPA Suite for enabling business architects and enterprise architects to model the complete business context around the process. In BPA 11gR1, which we shipped in August, we made many enhancements that you can read about here.

Collaborative BPM
With our existing products, our customers have built rich collaborative process portals that enable different stakeholders to collaborate, manage schedules, prioritize, etc. In BPM 11g, we will be taking this to the next level by providing out of the box collaborative process spaces built leveraging Web Center spaces. The three primary use cases are:

• Modeling space to facilitate collaboration around process discovery, modeling, and optimization
• Work space enabling end-users to leverage the power of Web 2.0 collaboration capabilities as they work on their BPM processes and tasks
• Instance specific space, where a collaboration space can be automatically created as part of a process instance with the right community provisioned and documents and discussions scoped to the process instance

Also, we are introducing Guided Business Processes, an innovative metaphor very similar to one used by most Tax preparation software, to help the end user navigate through a process.

Dynamic BPM
Many of our customers are using BPM to run some of their most sophisticated processes, which tend to be very dynamic in nature. We have always had very rich dynamic capabilities, including:

• Business rules driven process flows
• Business rules driven dynamic service binding
• Business rules driven task management including re-routing, delegation, load balancing, etc.

There is a nuanced enhancement we are making, that will be significant to customers who need that level of dynamism. Instead of doing a rule execution at a fixed point in the process and then driving flow based on it, we can now dynamically invoke rules as end users take actions and change the routing based on it.

We are also adding a web based Process Composer that allows business users to customize BPMN 2.0 processes; if the changes are confined to services, rules, tasks available in the business catalog, the customized process is deployment ready. This new feature has been getting great reviews and this concise description does not do it justice - however, plan to blog on this later as a separate topic.

While the above provides comprehensive support for anticipated changes, many times we need to deal with changes on the fly. For dealing with such unanticipated changes, we have always allowed appropriately privileged person to reassign, delegate, or re-route processes. While this enabled change to the process at the current point of execution, we now are adding more power - an appropriately privileged user can review the currently determined routing (what we sometime call as future approvers) and make changes at any step in the routing.

Intelligent BPM
Some of our customers do what we call "Intelligent BPM" - essentially, insight-driven actions and insightful actions. You can read more about this here.

An enhancement we are doing in this area is to allow business indicators and metrics to be captured along with the process model and for them to drive analytics and BAM dashboards.

Also, while BI provides a rear-view mirror and BAM provides a cock-pit view, we now also have Complex Event Processing that can act as a crystal ball, looking for patterns in events and using them to sense interesting events.

Unified and Comprehensive BPM Platform
A major theme for us is a comprehensive and unified BPM platform. Our customers tell us that the situation they have today, where they have multiple BPM products, and make determinations on the product to use based on the project requirements, is not sustainable. They invariably run into issues as the project's needs evolve and start stretching the parameters of the original assessment. Also, such fragmented and siloed architecture prevents end-to-end process management and monitoring.

One of the big benefits of our emphasis on unification is that we are able to provide same level of performance, scalability, reliability, and manageability across different process scenarios. Particularly interesting is the area of manageability; in this regard, some of the capabilities are:

• Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control for top down technical monitoring that provides comprehensive view of the topology and engine components
• End-to-end flow race and instance tracking through the various components a process instance may flow through
• Unified error hospital which provides for a rich policy based exception handling
• Unified policy management for managing security and other policies consistently across the stack

While this has been a rather large posting, due to the scope covered, it touches upon a lot of things but does not explain them in detail. Watch out this blog for future postings diving into various aspects touched upon in this post. Again, the presentation described in this blog is here.

Some of the concepts highlighted in this article are:

• Actionable Insight - launching processes based on BI insights and from BI dashboards. For example if BI shows a channel under capacity, launching a business process for changing allocation rules
• Insightful Action - two flavors of this are highlighted in this article:
1. Process and Business Rule leveraging the context available from BI to automatically adjust to optimal behavior
2. Human participants in the process having access to BI dashboards and reports at the point of taking decisions, such as within a BPM task

Another interesting use case of BPM and BI together that is not discussed in this article is how BI can be used to analyze processes and identify process improvements. Let us know if you have a good story to share in this regard.

Happy reading! Again, the article is here.

Summary

We are proud to release Oracle Business Process Management (OBPM) 10gR3 Maintenance Pack 1 (MP1). This release resolves several issues identified as critical for a successful operation of BPM projects.

It is strongly recommended that all customers running OBPM GA upgrade to OBPM MP1. This new release will also address several problems identified in Proof of Concepts during the last months that were delivered as Patches for OBPM 10gR3 GA.

This new release includes several bug corrections as well as introducing some new certifications that are outlined below. Please check the interoperability matrix included in the Release Notes.

1. Highlights of OBPM 10gR3 MP1

The following is a brief summary of the highlights of this release. More specific information can be found in the Release Notes archives associated to the OBPM 10gR3 MP1 binaries available at OTN: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bpm/index.html

• Oracle BPM Enterprise 10gR3 is certified to run on WebSphere 6.1.0.19 single node and cluster configurations.
• Oracle BPM Enterprise 10gR3 is certified to run with WCI Suite 10gR3 to expose the WorkSpace through the WCI Portal (formerly known as ALUI Portal).
• Complete migration from Oracle BPM 6.0 Collaboration Edition environments to Oracle BPM 10gR3 environments. Please check Known Issues for a couple of related issues to be addressed soon in a HF.
• Provide documentation updates on new features.
• OBPM WorkSpace Performance improvements.
• OBPM BPM Object Presentation Editor performance improvements.

1.1. New features or improvements in this release

There are no new features introduced in OBPM 10gR3 MP1.

1.2. Major Bug corrections added in this release

For a detailed list of issues corrected and addressed as well as a list of known issues, please check the Release Notes published on the OBPM 10gR3 Documentation Pages: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E13154_01/bpm/docs65/relnotes/release_notes_OracleBPM10gR3.htm

1.3. New certifications

The following are the new certifications included in this release:
• IBM WebSphere 6.1.0.19 to deploy all OBPM Web Applications and Engine WebSphere.
• Oracle Web Center Interaction Suite 10gR3 (to support Collaboration Edition Deployments in conjunction with WCI (formerly known as: ALUI).

2. Applies to the following OBPM Product Components and version:

• OBPM Studio 10gR3 GA
• OBPM Enterprise Standalone 10gR3 GA
• OBPM Enterprise for WebLogic 10gR3 GA

3. Download Instructions

Only new installers are provided for OBPM 10gR3 MP1 at OTN: http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/bpm/index.html. Upgrade packages can be obtained from OBPM Support (http://albpmsupport.bea.com). These upgrade packages can be used to upgrade an existing OBPM 10gR3 GA installation with only the deltas.