Yesterday I gave a talk at the Java User Group Hamburg about Activiti and BPMN 2.0. The amount of people interested was amazing (I counted over 100), even if the room was too small for this. But somehow we all managed to survive the bad air Further down I linked the slides (sorry, they are in German), but a big part of the presentation was a live demo. If you missed it, I will put a Screencast of the talk online soon (but again sorry: the talk was in German). And there are still opportunities to visit this talk, since I continue the tour with that talk over Germany.

Read on..

If you are using JBoss jBPM 3 in your current process automation projects you may face the problem, that some stakeholder (business, analysts, customers, marketing, …) ask for BPMN process models. And they often do for a good reason. But how do you get to that world? Do you have to throw away the jBPM 3 engine and start using a BPMN 2.0 Engine like Activiti? If yes, how could a migration path could look like?

But there are good news: Your are not the only one having this problem Hence we already worked out strategies with some of our customers. One is to keep the jBPM 3 engine (at least for some time), but use BPMN 2.0 models anyway. Therefore we wrote a complete transformation and graphical tooling around it. And just in time for Christmas we open source it And together with some other ideas this leads you towards a step by step migration strategy, so read on…
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Yesterday the W-Jax 2010 conference ended, with approx. 1,000 visitors one of the most successful events about Java in Germany. We had a booth there, and also gave some talks about Activiti and (Agile) BPM we also recored as screencasts. Since they are in German, they are not that interesting for you if do not speak that language ;-( But if you do, please don’t hesitate to watch them below. There is also an interview about BPMN (in German).

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Yesterday we gave a webinar, presenting our new Training “BPMN for IT requirements“. We got a lot of positive feedback, because the webinar was not just a marketing session, but also provided some useful information for all attendees.

We recorded a screencast of the session, but unfortunately in German . If you are English speaking and interested in such a training, just drop as a message, and maybe we will set up an English webinar as well. If you don’t mind German, you can watch the screencast here: http://connectpro57681650.emea.acrobat.com/p92235060/

While Bernd has been enjoying himself in Chile, I attended BPMN 2010 in Potsdam, Germany. I think I would have liked Chile better (after reading Bernds Blog Post), but the conference was still very interesting. My own talk was (suprise!) about the harmonization of organizational and technical process models for Business-IT-Alignment. I tried a screencast with audio track for the time for this talk, and it worked quite well. Unfortunately I gave the talk in German, but if you don’t mind, it’s here

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Our new training, “BPMN for IT requirements”, is all about better ways of engineering, documenting and managing IT requirements using BPMN. No matter if you plan to use a process engine, or if your project is about plain software development, customizing SAP-modules or the procurement of standard software. The final goal is just to improve your requirements specifications with BPMN.

But how should this concretely work? What are the pitfalls? Who is going to play what role? These are the questions we had to face a lot of times, in the last two years. This training is the “best of” our answers.

If you find that interesting, you should participate in our free webinar on October 21st, 11-11.45 am CEST (UTC+2). Thing is however, that this webinar will be in German . But if you don’t mind, or if you are interested in a webinar in English, just contact Maria.Courmont@camunda.com.

If there are enough people who want to get an English session, we will surely set it up for you

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?

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.

Read on..