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BPM 10G USAGE GUIDELINES
Design practices to facilitate migration to
BPM 12c
APRIL 2012
Authors: Andre Boaventura, Senior Principal Product Manager
Raul Tarda, Senior Principal Product Manager
Creation Date: March 28, 2012
Last Updated: April 04, 2012
The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information
purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any
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material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The
development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products
remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.
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Contents
1 EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW.............................................................................................4
2 PROCESS MODELING................................................................................................5
3 SIMULATION ...............................................................................................................6
4 USER INTERFACES (UI).............................................................................................6
5 BPM OBJECTS............................................................................................................6
6 INTEGRATION.............................................................................................................7
7 ORGANIZATION: PARTICIPANTS, ROLES, CALENDAR RULES, ETC. ................7
8 PROCESS BUSINESS RULES ...................................................................................8
9 PROCESS DASHBOARDS .........................................................................................8
10 SCRIPTING..................................................................................................................8
11 APPLICATION PROGRAMMING INTERFACES (API’s) ...........................................8
12 WORKSPACE CUSTOMIZATION...............................................................................8
13 PROCESS ADMINISTRATION AND AUTOMATED DEPLOYMENT SCRIPTS........9
14 IN-FLIGHT PROCESS INSTANCES ...........................................................................9
15 Component Catalog ...................................................................................................9
Catalog Migration SUMMARY..........................................................................................................9
16 CONCLUSION ...........................................................................................................11
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1 EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW
Oracle BPM, formerly known as AquaLogic BPM (ALBPM) is a core component of Oracle BPM Suite and an
area of significant continued investment. AquaLogic BPM and Oracle BPM are currently being used by hundreds of
customers to model, document and automate their mission critical business processes.
This paper describes how Oracle BPM customer can align their development and plans with Oracle’s BPM roadmap
to avoid surprises and enable the smoothest upgrade path.
Oracle is uniquely positioned to offer its customers a broad breadth of products and technologies in BPM and
related areas, including content management, imaging, business intelligence, Web 2.0, integration with Oracle Apps,
etc. In addition to functional products, Oracle also brings to table a breadth of cross functional products and
technologies including management, governance and tooling. It is Oracle’s strategy to deliver its customers a
significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO) through seamless integration and unification of these products.
Consistent to Oracle’s strategy, Oracle BPM will evolve and unify with the Oracle stack and fusion middleware
family of products. This will provide our customers a significantly better return on their investment. As customers
migrate their Oracle BPM projects to 12c the projects can immediately take advantage of integration to:
• Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM) will provide unified management and diagnostics capabilities across all
Oracle technologies including BPM.
• Coherence and other innovations at the infrastructure layer will provide better scalability and performance.
• Oracle BAM and CEP will provide significantly stronger event processing capabilities.
• Oracle Business Rules will provide strong business rules capabilities in a light footprint.
• Single WorkList across all the Fusion Middleware products and even across the next gen Apps.
In addition to unification, Oracle BPM has already evolved to better industry standards, such as BPMN 2.0, as
well as Oracle strategic standards, such as ADF.
Intended audience of this document
While we plan to keep the changes accompanying the evolution as transparent to customers as possible, as
part of the evolution there will be a few features in BPM 10g that:
• will not translate directly to a feature in BPM 12c and whose usage will require a manual change as part of
migration.
• will be brought forward only in a deprecated mode and will be supplanted by an alternative strategic feature.
The purpose of this document is to share with our customers the details we know now around such changes
so that they can plan accordingly, avoiding or minimizing their use when appropriate. These are just guidelines and
customers should weigh the benefit of the feature with the effort of change needed in future in making these
decisions.
This document is mainly targeted for customers working with Oracle BPM 10g and looking for implementation
guidelines that will facilitate migration of these projects to future releases of Oracle BPM like 12c release. Adherence
to these guidelines will facilitate migration. However, customers should not expect a completely automated migration.
Some manual changes may be needed in spite of adherence to these guidelines.
Scope of this document
This document is not a general usage guideline for Oracle BPM 10g. Please refer to Oracle BPM 10gR3 docs
and other literature for such guidelines. This document does not explain every referred feature in detail, assuming that
a customer affected by it already is aware of it.
This document is also not intended to provide a feature preview or statement of direction for BPM 12g
release. We will share this information in separate statement of direction documents.
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2 PROCESS MODELING
Oracle BPM 10g uses BPMN 1.1 as a modeling notation but persists and executes them as XPDL 2.0, due to
the fact that BPMN 1.1 is primarily a notation specification, lacking persistence format and sufficient execution
semantics. Oracle BPM 11g and 12c are based on BPMN 2.0, which does away with these limitations of BPMN 1.1;
Oracle BPM 12c, which is based on BPM 11g, will persist and execute native BPMN 2.0 models.
We expect to migrate Oracle BPM 10g XPDL 2.0 models to BPM 12c BPMN 2.0 models. Since process
constructs supported in Oracle BPM 12c will be based on the BPMN 2.0 standard (as its predecessor Oracle BPM
11g), we expect that most Oracle BPM 10g constructs may not be impacted or may have directly mapped
counterparts. Listed below are some known exceptions that may require manual process model changes for
migration:
• Process Creation and Termination Wait, used for asynchronous inter-process communication, will be
migrated to Evens.
• Groups will be migrated to Subprocesses, but transactional boundary will not be supported as the execution
default is now “greedy”.
• Grab functionality is included but not from process design, so no direct migration will be available. In 12c
Grab functionality will not include script execution.
• Decision activities may not be supported as-is (though functional equivalents will be provided).
• Interactive activities will be migrated to User tasks. However, method and component task implementations
will not be supported in BPMN 2.0
Arguments and Instance Variables
Input and output arguments, argument mappings and process variables will continue in BPM 12c and will be
migrated, with some minor caveats:
• Avoid using Separated Instance Variables, instead use external storage to persist such variables that
can be written to and read from the processes.
• Not all Predefined Variables will be supported as-is.
• Argument mapping: when doing argument mapping 10.3 offers an advance mode that allows PBL
code edition which will not be included in 12g.
Variable types
Simple variable types will be compatible. However complex types (such as java, iterators, etc) may not be
available. For this reason, usage as instance variables is not recommended and argument/local variables may need
manual migration.
Automatic Activities
Most Automatic activity implementations will continue in BPM 12c and will be migrated. However, automatic
activities with implementation type Method may require some manual changes to the scripts, especially if process
variables and APIs are used. It is our recommendation that the usage of scripting is minimized possible wrapping the
logic in re-usable components that could be used in the BPM 12c zero code base implementation.
Interactive Activities
Interactive Activities will be migrated to user tasks in BPMN 2.0 and will leverage the human workflow service
(shared with Oracle BPEL PM). Interactive activities implemented as screenflows in Oracle BPM 10g will continue to
be supported in BPM 12c and will be migrated. Please see section on Screenflows for further information.
Other implementations for Interactive activities such as Method, Input, Display and Decision may not be
supported as-is. Interactive activities with implementation type Method and Component may not be migrated.
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Module Names
Module names matching to any of the following "reserved words" will be converted to
<originalName>_Renamed.
Reserved module names:
Types
Errors
Events
Services
References
HumanTasks
Rules
Externals
3 SIMULATION
There may be some minor manual changes to apply to process models due to changes in process design
after the automatic migration execution.
4 USER INTERFACES (UI)
ADF is the strategic UI technology for all Oracle solutions including Oracle BPM Suite 11g and 12c.
• Screenflows will be converted into BPMN process
– A new feature to enable users to access the screens without going through Inbox will be added to
preserve user experience
– Our recommendation to our customers is to start getting in touch with ADF and ADF Task Flows
• ADF UI will be generated for Input/Display Components and Business Object Presentations
– Generation will seek to leverage metadata such as ordering from existing artifact
– Ready to deploy and run
• JSPs are supported in Oracle ADF framework so they can be partially reused in ADF projects, although it may
involve manual procedures. Fuego Tag Library (used for interaction with Business Objects) will not be
present in 12g, thus JSP edition will be necessary.
• External Tasks will most likely be migrated (subject to same constraints as scripts).
5 BPM OBJECTS
BPM 12c will leverage BPM Objects as a business friendly data abstraction. Any usage of BPM object for
data abstraction will be migrated to 12c.
The presentation aspect of BPM Objects has been discussed earlier in the UI section. In general it is better to
have separate BPM Objects for process data and presentations, except that the form relies directly on attributes of the
object.
• Both BO definition and methods will get migrated (see scripting).
• BPM 11/12 BO is XML based whereas 10g is Java based
– BOs inherited from some complex object types (DB, Java) will be migrated but without inheritance
– Also, others Java type behaviors such as method overriding may not be supported
• Not all predefined variables will be available
– Especially the ones such as ‘action’ that modify behavior
• Separated variables will become common data objects on migration. After migration use ADF-BC or DB
Adapter to achieve such behavior.
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6 INTEGRATION
The Oracle Adapter JCA framework will be the strategic integration layer. This will enable common adapters
across Service Bus, SOA and BPM tools from Oracle.
Specifically these adapters will include technology(), applications() and legacy(). We recommend our
customers to start using Oracle Adapters exposed either through BPEL PM or Oracle Service Bus for integration as
other architectures will likely require changes after migration.
The following introspection technologies will not have direct mapping for migration, so manual redesign will be
needed (either different native 12c features or not OOB external libraries/series): COM, .NET, EJB, Corba, JNDI,
JMX, JPD, SAP.
7 ORGANIZATION: PARTICIPANTS, ROLES, CALENDAR RULES,
ETC.
The Organization support in BPM 12c, including concepts of role, group, participant and organizational unit, is
planned to carry forward from Oracle BPM 10g (note exception in the next paragraph). However, the mapping of
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logical roles (as defined in BPM) to physical roles (as existing in LDAP or other directories) will have to be redone as
part of deployment of the migrated projects.
Deployment semantics of Organizational Units (OU) including visibility and deploying processes only to
specific OUs will not be supported in BPM12c. We recommend that customers do not rely on such behavior.
8 PROCESS BUSINESS RULES
BPM 12c will leverage Oracle Business Rules according to its base foundation, Oracle BPM 11g. However,
we expect to preserve customer investments in Process Business Rules by migrating them as scripts within the
process. However, in-flight modifications may not be permitted on migrated process business rules. Hence, customers
should consider leveraging Oracle Business Rules with Oracle BPM 10g for those cases where in-flight modifications
are expected.
9 PROCESS DASHBOARDS
Dashboards and KPIs created in Oracle BPM 10g will be migrated. However, this is only valid if the BPM
Object generated by the dashboard wizard was not edited or modified. Edits to the generated object will require
manual changes.
10 SCRIPTING
One of the significant areas of enhancement since BPM 11g, was the support for a zero-code environment
removing the need for most scripting in BPM. Recognizing the need to support optional scripting within BPM and the
emergence of standards in this area, we will support scripting in compliance with BPMN 2.0 and scripting standards.
To preserve customer investments, we expect to migrate most usages of scripting:
• BPM 12c will introduce Groovy for scripting
• 10gR3 script will be syntactically mappable to new Groovy scripts
• However, some usages inside the script may not have equivalent behavior
– Some predefined catalog components may not be available
– “action” and some other predefined variables will not be available
– PBL (Process Business Language) with embedded SQL may not be migrated; we recommend
using Oracle’s Adapters instead.
11 APPLICATION PROGRAMMING INTERFACES (API’S)
BPM 12c will have APIs that corresponds to Oracle BPM 10g APIs (PAPI, PAPI-WS). These will be
semantically similar and provide equivalent functionality. However, syntax and method signatures may differ requiring
some manual changes to client implementations using the BPM 10gR3 APIs.
12 WORKSPACE CUSTOMIZATION
We expect that most features of current Workspace will be available in a similar form and we do not expect
that end users will need retraining. Customizations to the out of the box workspace application will need to be re-
applied to the BPM 12c WorkSpace. The benefit for this is significant, however, in BPM 12c the user tasks and
workflow service will be common across BPEL PM and Oracle BPM and shared with Fusion Applications providing a
common set of features and functions across the stack and possibly different audiences.
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13 PROCESS ADMINISTRATION AND AUTOMATED DEPLOYMENT
SCRIPTS
Administration and deployment will be stronger in BPM 12c leveraging Oracle Enterprise Manager. Oracle
BPM 10g ant tasks will not be migrated to corresponding technology in BPM 12c; we plan to provide new examples
and libraries of commonly used ANT tasks to assist the migration.
14 IN-FLIGHT PROCESS INSTANCES
In-flight process instances will not be migrated from Oracle BPM 10g to BPM 12c1
; they will need to run to
completion on Oracle BPM 10g. To mitigate the operational impact of this, we expect to provide some capabilities to
run Oracle BPM 10g and BPM 12c side by side and see process instances in a common workspace (BPM 12c)2
.
However, the processes will have to be redeployed when moving to BPM 12c.
15 COMPONENT CATALOG
The following catalog components will undergo a change:
• Current testing capabilities - PUnit and CUnit - will be replaced by similar testing capabilities. This will allow
a unified test framework across SOA and BPM technologies. Existing PUnit and CUnit test cases will not be
migrated.
• The Fuego module components may not be supported in entirety.
• Plumtree module components will not be supported. Instead, we recommend that direct WCI APIs should be
used.
ƒ–ƒŽ‘‰ ‹‰”ƒ–‹‘
Catalog/Instrospector Migration Comment
Plumtree No Oracle Webcenter will be used
Java Yes Add libraries to Jdev project manually
Fuego – XML – XMLObject Under analysis
Fuego – XML – Xpath No
Fuego – XML - DynamicXML Under analysis
Fuego – Rules No
Fuego – Social No
Fuego – Test No
1
It is likely that APIs will be provided to enable custom code to achieve this.
2
Note that this is tentative at the time of writing of this document. Also, this does not imply a unified listing of tasks but
more likely multiple tabs within same application.
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Fuego – SQL No
Fuego – JMX No
Fuego – UI No
Fuego – Web Services Partially Scripting will allow WS invocation.
Fuego – PAPI Under analysis
Fuego – FDI No
Fuego – Util No
Fuego – Lib Under analysis
Fuego – Lang Under analysis
Fuego – Net Under analysis
Fuego – NetX Under analysis
Fuego – Msg Under analysis
Fuego – Auth No
Fuego – Bis No
Fuego – Chart No
Fuego – Corba No
Fuego – EJB No
Fuego – IO Under analysis
Fuego – SQL Under analysis Probably DynamicSQL will be migrated
Fuego – COM No
Fuego – Dynamic Under analysis
COM, .NET No
SQL Partially Embedded Usage: Yes.
Introspector: No (use Oracle adapter)
SQL Query Yes Mapped to Adapters
EJB No
Enumeration Yes
XML Schema Yes
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JNDI, JMX, JPD No
Oracle Service Bus Yes Migrated as web services
SAP, Corba No
Web Services Yes
16 CONCLUSION
Oracle BPM 12c will be a significant enhancement to Oracle BPM 10g and will provide enhanced value to
customers. This document outlined the changes in BPM 12c that customers need to account into their design choices
to ensure a smoother migration.
Finally, the value customers expect from BPM including business analyst participation, business IT
collaboration, agile development, and closed loop optimization will continue to be the areas of focus and continued
investment and enhancement. In exchange for any upgrade effort, BPM 12c will provide the same easy-of-use and
unified experience as Oracle BPM 10gR3 combined with the scalability, integration standards and unification of
Oracle’s solution.
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The preceding is intended to outline our general product
direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may
not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to
deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be
relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development,
release, and timing of any features or functionality described for
Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.