Next Wednesday during the OMG Technical Meeting in Berlin, there will be another live demonstration of BPMN 2.0 tools and their interchange capabilities. The demo is performed by the OMG’s BPMN Model Interchange Working Group (MIWG) and will be streamed live on YouTube on Wednesday the 17th of June at 4:00pm Berlin time. The BPMN MIWG if comprised of BPMN vendors as well as end users and its mission is to improve, test and showcase the import and export capabilities of BPMN 2.0 tools.

Camunda has been contributing to this working group since the very beginning, because BPMN interchange allows users …

Der neueste Standard der OMG heißt Decision Model and Notation (DMN) und erlaubt eine bessere Umsetzung von Business Rules in Ihren Geschäftsprozessen. Deshalb widmet sich die schönste Konferenz für Business Process Management (BPM) in diesem Jahr dem Thema Entscheidungen: Sie werden erfahren, wie der neue DMN-Standard in der BPM-Praxis angewandt werden kann und welche Vorteile tatsächlich realisierbar sind.

Außerdem wird Zalando in der Keynote aus dem Nähkästchen plaudern und beschreiben, wie das rasante Unternehmenswachstum mit zum Teil radikalen Maßnahmen so gestaltet wird, dass die Agilität nicht verloren geht. Weitere spannende BPM-Praxisberichte kommen von der Australischen Post, der Deutschen Bahn und …

There is a new kid on the block of BPM Blogs: Our tech lead Daniel Meyer started blogging, and since Daniel strives for excellence in anything he does, I would strongly recommend to

subscribe for the feed,
follow him on twitter and
read his latest post about how to express asynchronous service invocations in BPMN.

Disclaimer: No, he did not ask me to promote his new blog. In fact he will probably be mad at me because I did – because now it looks like he *did* ask for it – but I won’t mind 🙂

Camunda BPM 7.3 will be released on May 31, 2015 (yep, right on schedule!), and it will be jam-packed with outstanding new features.

My personal favorites are:

Process Instance Modification: Flexibly start and stop any step within your process – you can even use it like a Star Trek – style „token transporter“ and move your process instance from any current state into another. Check this out and be awestruck!

Super-Flexible Authorizations: Define who is able to do what within Camunda – for example, the members of a group „Marketing“ are only allowed to start, see and work on „their“ …

My formidable Co-Founder Bernd Rücker created a self-paced training course for Camunda BPM. It consists of 4.5 hours of video plus a couple of hands-on exercises with sample solutions.

You can complete this course if you want to get your feet wet with Camunda, plus it provides some valuable insights into best practices from our consulting experience, e.g. for creating UI in different technologies, writing unit tests or handling transactions.

And it’s free! You just have to sign up for the Camunda BPM Network, and off you go.

Get the Camunda BPM Online Training

A process engine typically call services actively (e.g. via Java, REST or SOAP) from within a Service Task. But what if this is not possible because we cannot reach the service? Then we use a pattern we called „External Task“ – which I briefly want to describe today.

Picture on the right taken from http://www.from-push-to-pull.com/projects/what-is-pull-marketing/ – thanks!

Context and problem

A couple of recent trends increased the need for this pattern, namely:

Cloud: When running process/orchestration engines in the cloud you might not be able to reach the target service via network connections – and VPNs or Tunneling is always cumbersome. It is …

Please note that there is a blog post available with much more recent thoughts on this matter: https://blog.bernd-ruecker.com/why-service-collaboration-needs-choreography-and-orchestration-239c4f9700fa.

Martin Fowler recommends in his famous Microservices Article: „Smart endpoints and dumb pipes“. He states:

The microservice community favours an alternative approach: smart endpoints and dumb pipes. Applications built from microservices aim to be as decoupled and as cohesive as possible – they own their own domain logic and act more as filters in the classical Unix sense – receiving a request, applying logic as appropriate and producing a response. These are choreographed using simple RESTish protocols rather than complex protocols such …

Picture taken by Benjamin Notheis from SAP, this year’s winner of the best-in-show-award

Clay Richardson from Forrester Research put it in a nutshell: „bpmNEXT means ‚Show me yours, I’ll show you mine’“.

And show we did: All BPM Software Vendors that *really* matter were there, presenting the latest and greatest they have to offer – or will offer soon. This was not about Sales or Marketing, but just about showing-off the things we’re proud of, and showing it off to peers who understand and appreciate the passion behind it.

But bpmNEXT is even more, it is the global gathering of a …

Camunda is spreading, also in Australia. The first usergroup is already evolving, and they will meet for the second time next week.

If you would like to swing by and meet some other Camunda users, here is what you need to know:

Date: Tuesday, March 31
Time: 5pm Melbourne Time
Place: Tuscan Bar – 79 Bourke Street, Melbourne

This time you can also meet Bernd Frey, one of our senior consultants who is currently down under and engaged in a fascinating Camunda project.

Many thanks to Phillip Spartalis, who is organizing this. He has agreed to share his email address here in case …

Yesterday we had our first Camunda Community Day in the UK. Thanks to our friends at 6point6 who organized this, we could meet in the famous Royal Institution. This was definitely the most decent location we had for a communiy meeting so far!

It was a great half day of presentations, discussions and networking. Most of the attendees already knew existing BPM products, and when I described the Zero-Code BPM Myth they immediately knew what I was talking about. I also gave a little BPMN crash-course, and I did not use a single slide, but just live-modeled everything I explained …