One of the oldest BPMS's around is one you may not have heard of: AWD from DST Technologies. If you send in a check to fund your retirement account or pay an insurance premium, chances are good that AWD is running the process to handle that transaction and the customer service surrounding it. Up to now it's mostly been used in high-volume BPO operations, many run by DST itself for some of the largest financial services companies in the world.
Confused about Lombardi Edition vs WebSphere Dynamic Process Edition? This white paper will help you sort it out.
This is the one based on WebSphere Process Server. Get the white paper here.
I read somewhere that it was possible to chain xslt's together, so I thought it was worth a try to combine the Visio-to-BPMN transform and the BPMN validator into a single operation. And it worked! So now you can do Method and Style validation directly on diagrams created with the BPMN template in Visio Premium 2010. (You can still transform to BPMN 2.0 or XPDL xml if you want.) The updated page is still here.
As promised, here is my first cut at a single list of the rules of BPMN, both the official rules from the spec (prefixed BPMN) and my "method and style" rules (prefixed Style). All are implemented in my Method and Style Validation tool. Note: for now, this list assumes the model includes no event subprocesses. BPMN 0101. All flow objects other than start events, boundary events, and compensating activities must have an incoming sequence flow, if the process level includes any start or end events.
Last Friday I had a run-through of my upcoming BPMN Method and Style Level 1 workshop. It was a good thing. I got some helpful feedback on the content, and I learned a few tricks of Microsoft Visio 2010 (having the Visio product manager in attendance didn't hurt). It was a little rushed to squeeze all of Level 1 into a 4-hour window, so I am expanding the workshop to 5 hours instead of 4.
I apologize for the inconvenience, but after a few months of difficulty rooting out a hack to my BPMS Watch site, I had to rebuild it on another host. Since I use BPMS Watch as my main website now, I changed the URL to www.methodandstyle.com instead of www.methodandstyle.com/wordpress. Maybe not the best idea, since bookmarked links don't work any more. The feed should still be the same (I hope). Let me know if you see any other problems with the site.
If you've been wanting to learn how to add "method and style" to your BPMN modeling but not yet ready for the full BPMessentials training and certification, here's an opportunity for you. On July 20, I'll be conducting a 4-hour BPMN Method and Style Level 1 Workshop in a virtual classroom format, i.e., interactive delivered over the Internet. It will include hands-on exercises using the brand new Microsoft Visio Premium 2010, which includes native BPMN support.
It's safe to say that despite the proliferation of real BPMN tools, the majority of BPMN-like process diagrams that exist in the world have been created in Microsoft Visio. For me, Visio - by itself - was always just a "drawing" tool, not a real modeling tool. Even if you could find a BPMN stencil for Visio - there were a couple for BPMN 1.0, but it got harder to do with stencils as the standard evolved - the tool didn't understand the BPMN semantics, the parent-child diagram relationships.
Thanks to all of you who contacted OMG in support of the BPMN 2.0 conformance classes proposal. Yesterday I received a copy of the following note sent out to Finalization Task Force members: Supporters of the conformance sub-types proposal: SAPERION AG EFG Consulting Ltd Raytheon iG, Brasil DUNA, Spain Statoil ASA Computas AS Visionest Fraunhofer-Institut fr Software- und Systemtechnik ISST "Following the request of Bruce Silver (https://www.methodandstyle.com/2010/03/29/bpmn-tool-interoperability-make-your-voice-heard/#comments) I want to notify that SAPERION (and Signavio, see CC addresses) want to support the interchange of BPMN 2.