Computerwoche is one of the most read magazines for IT-Professionals in Germany (I would actually assume it is THE most read one), and therefore I was quite happy I could contribute an article about BPM-Software to their last edition. Well, the article is in German, of course, but if you are brave enough you will download the PDF and try to read it anyway If not, here comes the core message of it: I divided BPM-Systems into the categories “pure play”, “embedded”, “saas” and “open source”. I consider that useful, although there can be overlappings such as an open source – BPMS that is embedded into a commercial product like an CRM or ERP. Then I thought about the future of commercial pure play BPMS and came to the result, that a shift of market shares is likeley, boosting the relevance of both Open Source BPM and SaaS BPM at the expense of “classical” on premise, closed source BPM products, which was also one of the reasons for our engagement in the Activiti project.

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As I blogged earlier this day the first preview version of Activiti Cycle is on its way. I want to take this opportunity to give you some technical insights into Cycle and to explain some basic ideas behind it. If you are interested in the vision, I recommend to visit the Activiti Cycle Homepage, my infoQ article about camunda fox, or the camunda fox Homepage.
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In May this year we announced camunda fox as open source platform with the focus on Business-IT-Alignment leveraging BPMN. We announced Version 1.0 ready for August 2010. Now we have August, and we have something ready Read on..

It took some time, but now you can find the official “BPMN 2.0 by Example”-Document on BPMN.org. The direct link is

http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?dtc/10-06-02

Besides our example concerning the incident management process that I have already blogged about, it contains a small introduction into the basic principles of working with BPMN (Chapter 5: Small examples introducing core concepts).

On top of that there are quite interesting examples about the serialization of BPMN-diagrams and the according diagram interchange between BPMN modelers, and more complex diagrams are demonstrated, like the famous Email-voting example.

I consider the document rather useful for getting a first but profound impression of BPMN.

Our “Praxishandbuch BPMN”, the practical guide for working with BPMN, has become quite successful. Published in January 2010, the first edition has been already sold out in July. This and the fact that BPMN 2.0 has been finalized encouraged us (and our publisher, Hanser Verlag) to update the book and publish a second edition. Unfortunately, it is still only available in German. We actually tried to order a translation into English from an agency, but the work samples they provided could not convince us. I think, you must be into the topic to write a good specialist book, even if you are only translating it. However, at camunda none of us can spare enough time to do that, so unless a native speaker shows up willing to do the translation, and convincing us that he or she is actually able to do a really good one, this book remains German.

But if you want to get an easy to read guide about how to apply BPMN with loads of best practices based on massive project experiences, AND you are looking for the perfect book to improve your German, hang on until the middle of september and get the second edition freshly from Amazon.de .

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In the beginning of October, I will be attending this year’s BPMN-conference in Potsdam, Germany. I consider it rather interesting, because there will be talks about scientific research as well as hands-on-sessions given by BPMN-practitioners, like Vattenfall, Ebay and of course camunda

More Information: http://www.bpmn2010.org

See you there?

Recently we announced http://fox.camunda.com/ and I already talked about it on a couple of conferences or similar occasions. Now I had the honor to write on infoQ about it and the experiences we made so far. Basically I tried to create a plot in the various things we do there at the moment and give a better impression on where we are heading. Hopefully that makes it easier for you to catch my ideas, easier than searching through our blog and presentations Since today you can find the article online here:

http://www.infoq.com/articles/collaborativeBPM.

Enjoy! I am curious about feedback… And stay tuned, we plan to release something soon.

Stephen White has already blogged about it: BPMN 2.0 is finished, approved by OMG architecture board and will be published soon. For camunda it was mainly Falko Menge who represented us in the FTF, and he did a very good job (thanks Falko!). Falko and me also wrote a good part of the “BPMN 2.0 by Example”-Document (many thanks to Ivana Trockovitch, Denis Gagné and the other authors!), that should work as a tutorial for understanding the basic principles of BPMN. Because the whole package is not published officially yet, I just want to blog one of the two chapters we wrote that I consider interesting for people who want to get from “business-friendly simple diagrams” to “directly executable XML”.

At some points I will also add some comments from our project experiences that of course could not make it into the official OMG document.

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It just had to happen sooner or later, so count me in: http://twitter.com/jakobfreund

In a current project we develop an executable process. Hence, this process is a “piece of software”, which need to be tested. In software development this is common sense, so there are enough tools and best practices. Is that the same for technical process models? Hmm, not that easy. On the one hand we can use proved Java Test frameworks like JUnit for Open Source Process Engines like jBPM. On the other hand processes have some specialties, which aren’t surprising but somehow challenging…

Read on..