Getting started with Oracle BPM Suite 11gR1 : a hands-on tutorial : learn from the experts--teach yourself Oracle BPM Suite 11g with an accelerated and hands-on learning path brought to you by Oracle BPM Suite Product Management team members

537 Pages·2010·23.14 MB·English

by  Heidi Buelow

Getting Started with Oracle
BPM Suite 11gR1
A Hands-On Tutorial
Learn from the experts – teach yourself Oracle BPM
Suite 11g with an accelerated and hands-on learning
path brought to you by Oracle BPM Suite Product
Management team members
Heidi Buelow
Manoj Das
Manas Deb
Prasen Palvankar
Meera Srinivasan
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Getting Started with Oracle BPM Suite 11gR1
A Hands-On Tutorial
Copyright © 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written
permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in
critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy
of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is
sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors, nor Packt
Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages
caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the
companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals.
However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: September 2010
Production Reference: 1060910
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-849681-68-1
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Sandeep Babu ([email protected])
Credits
Authors Editorial Team Leader
Heidi Buelow Aanchal Kumar
Manoj Das
Manas Deb Proofreader
Aaron Nash
Prasen Palvankar
Meera Srinivasan
Graphics
Geetanjali Sawant
Acquisition Editor
James Lumdsen
Production Coordinator
Shantanu Zagade
Technical Editors
Alfred John
Cover Work
Aanchal Kumar
Shantanu Zagade
Manasi Poonthottam
Indexer
Hemangini Bari
Rekha Nair
Foreword
Oracle released the BPM Suite 11gR1 product in April, 2010. This is part of the
11gR1 release cycle for the Oracle Fusion Middleware (FMW) family of products
that started in the summer of 2009. This release marks the unification of features
of the Aqua Logic BPM (ALBPM) product that Oracle obtained as part of its BEA
acquisition in 2008, and that BEA had in turn acquired from Fuego, with Oracle
BPEL PM, SOA Suite, and the FMW framework. As with all FMW products, BPM
Suite 11gR1 follows the guiding principles behind the FMW products: complete,
integrated, open, and best-of-breed in its Business Process Management Suite
(BPMS) offering. At the time of the BEA acquisition, ALBPM was an industry-
leading BPM product – the BPM Suite 11g release preserves and enhances the
best of ALBPM features such as ease of modeling, simulation, and basic process
analytics. It also adds a significant set of capabilities that leverage other synergistic
products from the FMW family, such as strong support for backend integration,
event handling, Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0
style collaboration, extended process analytics and actionable insights, and superior
performance, scalability and system reliability.
With BPM adoption, organizations aim to generate high-value business benefits via
increased efficiency, visibility, and agility. However, often such initiatives fail to
produce satisfactory results due to a variety of reasons—certain limitations in their
chosen BPMS tool set account for some of these reasons. For example, many BPM
products specialize in addressing either human, document, system, or decision-centric
projects, or cater to either small departmental projects with simpler GUI but limited
capabilities, or large enterprise deployments that have complex and fragmented
IDEs and execution engines. Also, traditionally BPM tools with enhanced features
for developers have been difficult for business users to use. A key goal of Oracle's
BPM Suite 11g offering is to eliminate such barriers to successful BPM adoption by
providing a comprehensive and unified BPM product that addresses all flavours of
BPM projects, provides the best tools for every persona engaged in the BPM lifecycle,
and evolves seamlessly from simple projects to more complete scenarios.
Typical BPM solutions involve the modeling of complex human interactions,
business rules, and connections to a variety of IT systems. Such solutions also need
to incorporate security policies, exception handling, and the handling of business
events. These applications are commonly deployed as distributed applications. To
get maximum productivity and value from these projects, in addition to a good
product you need a good understanding of the applicable software tools. To help
you in understanding the tools better, the BPM Suite product management team has
put together this getting-started tutorial.
The authors of this book have been instrumental in defining and designing the
product, and creating, delivering, and rolling-out BPM Suite 11gR1 training
programs internally and externally to partners and customers. In this book they take
a step-by-step approach to incrementally building a non-trivial BPM application.
They utilize a broad range of product features providing click-by-click guidance at
every step. If your goal is to get started quickly with BPM Suite 11gR1, you will find
the content and style of this book highly appropriate. BPM Suite 11g is a best-in-class
product with an eye to the future, and I hope you will enjoy working with it.
Michael Weingartner
Vice President, Product Development
Oracle
About the Authors
Heidi Buelow is a BPM Product Manager with Oracle and is responsible for Oracle
BPM Suite and programs such as beta and technical previews. Heidi joined Oracle
in 2006, and previously was Chief Application Architect developing a Business
Process Management engine, developer toolset, and application framework. Heidi
started her career as a software developer at Xerox working on the Xerox Network
Services and Star Workstation products, where she first learned to appreciate object-
oriented and services-oriented technologies. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree
in Computer Science from the University of Southern California.
Manoj Das is Director of Product Management at Oracle, responsible for Oracle's
BPM Suite of products. Manoj's BPM journey started at Siebel Systems, where he was
responsible for the next generation, process-centric and insight-driven application
platform. He plays a leading role setting BPM and SOA industry standards,
especially in BPMN 2.0, BPEL, and Business Rules. He is widely recognized at
industry conferences and from Information Technology publications. Manoj has a BS
in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur and an MBA from UC Berkeley. He has held
senior Product Management, Development Management, and Product Development
positions at Oracle, Siebel, Mentor Graphics, and others.
Manas Deb is a senior director in the Fusion Middleware/SOA, BPM, Governance
Suites Product Group at Oracle HQ. He currently leads outbound product
management and many strategic engagement initiatives for Oracle's SOA, BPM and
Governance solutions, worldwide. He is also responsible for Oracle/HQ-based SOA
Methodology initiatives. He has worked in the software industry for over 20 years,
most of which have been spent in software product management/marketing and on
architecting and leading a wide variety of enterprise-level application development
and business integration projects in a range of industries. A graduate of The
Indian Institute of Technology (KGP), Manas attended post-graduate studies at the
University of Texas at Austin. He received his PhD in an inter-disciplinary program
comprising Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, and Engineering. Manas also
holds an MBA with specialization in international business.
Prasen Palvankar is a Director of Product Management at Oracle and is
responsible for outbound SOA Suite and BPM Suite product-related activities
such as providing strategic and architectural support to Oracle's SOA Suite and
BPM Suite (current and prospective) customers, and also field and partner
enablement, and training. Prasen joined Oracle in 1998 and worked as a Technical
Director in the Advanced Technology Solutions group in Oracle Consulting
delivering large-scale integration projects before taking on his current role five years
ago. Prior to joining Oracle, he worked as a Principal Software Engineer at Digital
Equipment Corporation.
Meera Srinivasan is a BPM Product Manager with Oracle and is responsible for
Oracle BPM Suite and Oracle BPA Suite. She has 15 years of extensive experience in
integration, SOA, BPM, and EA technologies, and represents Oracle at OMG, OASIS,
and other industry consortia. Meera joined Oracle in 2003, and was part of the SOA
Product Management team managing Adapters. Prior to joining Oracle, she spent
seven years with TIBCO Software, a pioneer in electronic trading, message-oriented
middleware, and enterprise integration. At TIBCO, she was an Engineering Manager
involved in managing the development of various Adapters and EAI technologies.
She holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of
Florida at Gainesville.
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank the Oracle BPM Suite 11g development and product
management teams, and the leadership team of Bhagat Nainani, David Shaffer,
Michael Weingartner, Hasan Rizvi, and Thomas Kurian for their vision, strategy
and creation of the industry-leading BPM and process-enabling software suite that
was used in this book. The work presented here has substantially benefited from the
input and feedback of many, including members of business integration software
product management and the enterprise architecture groups, over five hundred
training attendees within and outside of Oracle, and the instructors who delivered
the training to them. We specifically would like to mention the direct contributions
of Avinash Dabholkar, Eduardo Chiocconi, Yogeshwar Kuntawar, Payal Srivastava,
and Mark Wilkins. Thanks also to our former colleague Dan Atwood who is
currently with Avio Consulting. Dan provided great feedback on many of the
chapters. In addition, we would like to acknowledge and give thanks for help
received from Sheila Cepero and Todd Adler in handling all the necessary legal steps
within Oracle associated with the publishing of this book.
The publishing team at Packt Publishing was wonderful to work with—the
enthusiasm, promptness, and guidance of James Lumsden, Aanchal Kumar, Alfred
John, and Manasi Poonthottam throughout the evolution of this book are particularly
worthy of mention.
Finally, we would like to expressly thank our families for their love and support as
we took on the challenge of putting this book together on top of our already very
busy schedules and borrowed heavily from the invaluable family time.
Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: Business Process Management 7
BPM—context and historical perspective 8
Evolution of BPM tools and standards 10
Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) 10
SOA and BPM 12
Notational standards in BPM – BPEL and BPMN 13
The promise of BPM – key benefits 14
Summary 16
Chapter 2: Getting Started with BPM 17
Areas of focus for successful BPM adoption 18
Starting with the right business process 20
Creating a process-based application 21
Roles in BPM projects 23
Summary 26
Chapter 3: Product Architecture 27
Guiding principles 27
Design environment 28
User-centric design tools 28
Composite BPM project 28
Runtime architecture 30
Unified SCA server 30
Workflow architecture 31
Process analytics 32
Deployment topology 33
Security 35
User authentication and authorization 35
Policy-driven security 36