What's New In ActiveVOS 6.0 ActiveVOS 6.0

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1 What's New In ActiveVOS 6.0 ActiveVOS Active Endpoints Inc. ActiveVOS and ActiveVOS are trademarks of Active Endpoints, Inc. All other company and product names are the property of their respective owners. 2008

2 Content Introduction... 3 Business Process Modeling... 4 Business Process Simulation... 6 Business Activity Monitoring... 7 Custom Reporting... 8 Unified Console Root Cause Analysis On-Event Processing Project and Process Templates Orchestration of Plain Old Java Services Extended Identity Provider Support - JDBC Logical People Group Queries Process Access to External Business Parameters Process Detail Zoom Slider Inbox Form Generation Task Inbox RSS Feeds Preserving Comment History across multiple People Activities Summary/Conclusion About Active Endpoints Copyright 2008, Active Endpoints, Inc. Page 2 of 21

3 Introduction ActiveVOS makes it easy to design, build, manage, deploy and maintain services-based applications. We ve worked hard with the ActiveVOS 6.0 release to deliver: An all-in-one solution. Everything you need is in one place: graphical process modeling and design, a rock-solid, proven and scalable execution engine, superior testing and deployment capabilities, and -- an industry first -- an integrated complex event processing (CEP) engine. Gone are the days when you had to create an "infrastructure" before you could actually begin creating applications. No longer do you have to alter a process to integrate it with some new capability that you need but which resides elsewhere. Now you can reuse all your Java code, simply and compatible. It's obvious: when everything you need is in one product, of course it will be easier to create next generation applications. A 100% standards-based product. Model processes using the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN)...run them on a mature, scalable Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) engine. Incorporate human processes using BPEL4People and WS-Human tasks. Open standards protect enterprises because they prevent vendor lock-in. Open standards make it easier and faster for developers to produce new and enhanced applications. In short, everyone wins with standards (except, of course, vendors of proprietary technologies.) This document introduces great new features available with ActiveVOS 6.0. Copyright 2008, Active Endpoints, Inc. Page 3 of 21

4 Business Process Modeling Process modeling and analysis is a major pain point for enterprises today. Those that attempt to model their processes too often find that the models they create end up on the shelf because the logical model of the process simply cannot be turned into an executable processes by their IT staff. The benefits sought through methodical modeling rarely materialize. ActiveVOS 6.0 makes this a thing of the past. Not only can you use the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) standard to graphically describe your processes incorporating services and human activity, you can also document your requirements including goals, key performance indicators (KPI), organizational information and human activity. ActiveVOS produces correct-by-construct BPMN diagrams. Its process decomposition capabilities allow you and your team to iterate and decompose complex processes a component at a time. ActiveVOS UML2, Rose and XPDL import capabilities allow you to import existing business models. Models created with Microsoft Visio are especially common in many organizations and ActiveVOS imports these easily. ActiveVOS allows you to preserve or migrate what you have today and turn your logical models into executable BPEL processes. ActiveVOS can also output Microsoft Word documents that you can share with others for review. BPMN s intuitive notation makes it simple for developers, application architects and business analysts to collaborate on requirements. As you make changes, you can use ActiveVOS change tracking and versioning capabilities to refine your process definition until it s time implement it. Once you and your team are done, a BPMN-to-BPEL export makes it simple to transform your logical model into its BPEL and BPEL4People executable representation. Alternatively, if you wish to document existing BPEL processes, ActiveVOS will automatically transform BPEL and BPEL4People to their BPMN representation. Key features Standard BPMN modeling notation Import from Visio, UML2, XPDL, Rose Copyright 2008, Active Endpoints, Inc. Page 4 of 21

5 Auto-generate BPEL 2.0, and BPEL4People and WS-Human Task definitions Annotate processes and generate Word documents for review Interchange between BPMN and BPEL to keep requirements and implementation in synch User-defined properties to support key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g. costing information) Modeling tool vs. Drawing tool (Correct-by-construct) Process decomposition Goals and traceability Change tracking and versioning Enables two-way dialog between business process owner/analyst and the IT developer working with logical diagrams and making them executable. Document business process, goals, KPIs and related documents Preserves investments in legacy diagramming tools Copyright 2008, Active Endpoints, Inc. Page 5 of 21

6 Business Process Simulation ActiveVOS makes it possible for business analysts and application architects to evaluate business process flows before proceeding to implementation or to optimize them during requirements and implementation phases. The simulation capabilities of ActiveVOS can help make decisions as to how much and what to automate first. With ActiveVOS simulation, determining whether or not to automate human activities can be made more systematic. ActiveVOS simulation capabilities allow you to evaluate various aspects such as feasibility, overall performance of a process that incorporates functions automated by services and BPEL orchestration, and balance the cost and resource utilization associated by introduction human activity. This enables business analysts to improve and optimize process quality and performance; reduce process cost; discover weak points and bottlenecks; and identify benchmarks. Built-in time-related KPIs and support for user-defined properties and KPIs allow various metrics to be simulated and measured. Through simulation a business analyst can mimic complicated business environments including resource pools and multiple business processes (workers often need to support multiple business processes and multiple tasks). Once the simulation is complete, it can be saved as a Microsoft Excel document for further analysis. Validate design without expensive implementation Resource and capacity planning (e.g., how many level-2 support personnel do I need for next year?) Discover optimized business process model with inputs from business activity monitoring (BAM) Copyright 2008, Active Endpoints, Inc. Page 6 of 21

7 Business Activity Monitoring ActiveVOS s dashboards and its broad range of built-in reports, graphs and custom reporting capabilities make it possible for customers to create custom activity monitoring reports and analyze trends. Out of the box, ActiveVOS 6.0 ships with reports that detail important system metrics, like the current top running processes and analysis of usage trends over 24 hours of processes or human activity. ActiveVOS builds in the ability to get access to information about active processes, alarm and receive process queues or getting a bird s eye view of building work queues across groups of people. Building custom operational views is easy with ActiveVOS. Standard reports such as top processes executing over a 24-hour period can easily be turned into a least-used process graph allowing managers to make decisions when to retire processes that are no longer needed. Breaking down human tasks by group and by role is simple, allowing a manager to understand when to make staffing adjustments. Copyright 2008, Active Endpoints, Inc. Page 7 of 21

8 Using the ActiveVOS task inbox, standard or even RSS, managers can be alerted to application issues and performance problems. Coupled with its on-event processing capabilities, ActiveVOS permits managers to respond to trends as they are discovered and proactively take action. Questions like, How much? and How often? and Are we slowing down or speeding up? are answered directly and in detail by ActiveVOS 6.0. Using ActiveVOS dashboards, reporting and graphing, managers can take control of their businesses. ActiveVOS makes it possible to better understand, analyze, and describe deployed and operating business processes. Custom Reporting ActiveVOS custom reporting makes it possible for managers to quickly obtain the information they need to make decisions. Simple but important questions that other systems cannot easily answer are now possible. For example: What are the top 10 most frequently used processes based on the number of messages they consume/generate? What processes are no longer used (enough) and that I can retire? What are the top 10 longest running processes on average? Which processes take more than 5 seconds on average to execute and need to be optimized? What is the min/max/avg message throughput of each process type by partner? ActiveVOS integrated reporting makes it simple to build these types of reports. Developers can start with samples provided or simply adapt standard reports to meet a specific business intelligence and activity monitoring need. Copyright 2008, Active Endpoints, Inc. Page 8 of 21

9 Once the report is created and tested locally on the developer s machine, it can be automatically deployed to ActiveVOS and conveniently made available to any user to view and access online or as a Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel or PDF document. Report data can also be exported into CSV format, or data can be pulled via a URL for use in an external portal. The above depicts the Process Distribution Report Template sample. Copyright 2008, Active Endpoints, Inc. Page 9 of 21

10 Unified Console Whether you are a developer, an application architect or business analyst, or a line of business operations manager, the ActiveVOS s console provides you with the information you need. From the ActiveVOS console developers can quickly discover what process definitions have been deployed and which artifacts such as WSDL or schema documents they depend on. The ActiveVOS console can also be used by developers to access information on running processes they may need to monitor. Notably, the visual representation of a process in the console is exactly the same representation of the process as it was developed, making it easy for developers to analyze and correct a problem quickly. Coupled with root cause analysis capabilities of ActiveVOS and its process suspend features, ActiveVOS provides developers, IT operations staff and business owners with the tools and visibility they need to correct problems when they occur. Copyright 2008, Active Endpoints, Inc. Page 10 of 21

11 Root Cause Analysis Understanding where and why a problem occurred is an absolute requirement for today s automated business process management systems. Yet, in an SOA environment, this is a very complicated thing to do. ActiveVOS makes it possible to graphically look back in time at any process and analyze precisely what data flowed through the system and which process decisions were made by a service or a user performing a human task. ActiveVOS allows you to learn how and why a specific activity took place. Debugging a failure due to malformed data received from a partner is readily available. You know longer need to correlate what happened from piece parts; all the information you need is at hand. Using ActiveVOS root cause analysis capabilities and activity logging business operations managers can rest assured that they will always be able to have an answer to why a problem happened. Copyright 2008, Active Endpoints, Inc. Page 11 of 21

12 On-Event Processing In ActiveVOS, adaptation to changing business circumstances is achieved through the integration of a highly-flexible complex event processing capability which permits users to dynamically respond to external knowledge and to accumulations of knowledge gained from the internal state of the business as represented by its running application systems. ActiveVOS 6.0 complex event processing features include: Native integration between ActiveVOS s execution and CEP engines. The execution engine emits events for both running processes and events for the engine itself CEP filters and variables are deployment-time artifacts, making it easy for CEP applications to be developed for in-production processes CEP decisions can alter running business processes or instantiate new processes, including initiating human tasks Data can be correlated easily over time and from multiple processes as well as from external applications to maximize the ability to respond to events CEP engine processes both individual events and collections of events, known as event windows Flexible CEP language statements, derived from industrystandard SQL, permit developers to quickly implement applications Extensible event type definitions, which allow running processes to transform key business data into events without having to modify the definition of the process. While dedicated CEP environments are appropriate for certain very high performance and specialized applications, ActiveVOS s objective is to democratize CEP. For far too long, because CEP has been something users had to acquire separately and then integrate into their processing engines, it has not been as widely deployed as it can and should be. To overcome this obstacle, ActiveVOS makes CEP part of the core capabilities of the system. For example, our execution engine, long considered the best BPEL execution environment available, has always Copyright 2008, Active Endpoints, Inc. Page 12 of 21

13 emitted the kinds of events that are needed for CEP. This means users do not have to assemble the piece parts of CEP in order to use it. It s just there. In addition, de-coupling the CEP application from the design of the business process (CEP is a deployment-time capability in ActiveVOS) maximizes users ability to implement CEP because when a CEP application is required, in-production, running business processes do not have to be affected. ActiveVOS implemented the SQL-based EPL language, ensuring that users be able to rapidly adopt CEP in their applications. Project and Process Templates ActiveVOS project and process templates provide a great way to jump start process and application development. ActiveVOS project and process templates give developers a great working starting point to develop new applications. Unlike sample files or directories these templates are always available from the new orchestration project and process wizards without having to leave the design environment. Project templates implement ActiveVOS best practices and enhance learning as they provide stub processes for common system processing. Each project Copyright 2008, Active Endpoints, Inc. Page 13 of 21

14 template is provided with a cheat sheet which helps step developers through using it. Provides self-contained processes and application within the product to help users get started Provides an extension point to contribute enhanced or new templates Additional wizard page for creating new orchestration projects and processes from templates Easy to find and well-documented Copyright 2008, Active Endpoints, Inc. Page 14 of 21

15 Orchestration of Plain Old Java Services Services take on many shapes and forms and perhaps the most common form is a plain old Java object (POJO). ActiveVOS has brought integration of Java services to a whole new level by introducing a sophisticated POJO invocation mechanism from BPEL processes. Simplifies integration of a common service type Java Helps with rapid prototyping as often the real services aren t available when the development of the processes start Drag and drop wizard Automated class packaging and deployment Copyright 2008, Active Endpoints, Inc. Page 15 of 21

16 Extended Identity Provider Support - JDBC Many systems use enterprise directories such as LDAP for authenticating users, but store their access control information in a database. ActiveVOS allows administrators to setup their human tasks to access user and group information for access control from these databases. Use databases for task authorization and user/group attributes Robust mapping facility for standard and extended identity fields Expands the options for identity authorization and selection Logical People Group Queries Logical people groups are a robust mechanism for describing parameters for use in determining the identities associated with task roles. Many enterprise workflow applications require this capability. And example is assigning tasks based on employee location or certification. ActiveVOS allows the mapping of logical people groups to identity queries which can utilize the parameters to produce the correct set of identities to perform the required task. Mapping logical people group to identity query Use logical people group parameters in an identity query Expand the set of enterprise use cases that logical people groups can address Copyright 2008, Active Endpoints, Inc. Page 16 of 21

17 Process Access to External Business Parameters Adaptability is the heart of an orchestration system. Processes require their business parameters to be configured or reconfigured to meet the changing environment of the business. ActiveVOS allows business parameters to be deployed separately as resources for the process. Then, these parameters can be changed manually and/or by other processes to adapt running applications to meet the needs of the business. Allows developers to deploy XML configuration documents to a resource catalog. Allow business processes to automate changes to the configuration documents Adapt business processes to changes in the enterprise/business environment Copyright 2008, Active Endpoints, Inc. Page 17 of 21

18 Process Detail Zoom Slider Business processes often contain implementation complexity that can hide the valuable business functions they perform. ActiveVOS 6.0 introduces a capability of adjusting the amount of detail presented to the user about the process. This allows the user to go from a 30,000 foot view down to the 1 foot view at the touch of a button. Toolbar button / control change the detail view of the process at 5 preconfigured levels. Easier process understanding, by hiding often unimportant complexity Enables printouts of the process at the appropriate level of detail for better communication with members of the project team Inbox Form Generation ActiveVOS features a WS-Human Task compliant inbox application for retrieving and displaying tasks to users. XSL style sheets are used to customize the task displays to meet the needs of the user. ActiveVOS includes a push-button mechanism to generate the XSL needed to present customizations in the task display. Browse to existing resources or create XSL based on the task definition Developers can make customization their task interfaces with very little effort (add graphics, change labels, colors, etc.) Copyright 2008, Active Endpoints, Inc. Page 18 of 21

19 Task Inbox RSS Feeds Businesses and their employees have a wide variety of office productivity tools at their disposal. Many of these tools (e.g. portals and mail clients) can integrate data from other applications by subscribing to RSS feeds. ActiveVOS 6.0 automatically produces RSS feeds for task lists. These tasks lists are then easily integrated into these RSS aware productivity tools. Supports ATOM 1.0 feed Easily integrate task management with portals and clients Copyright 2008, Active Endpoints, Inc. Page 19 of 21

20 RSS integrated ActiveVOS Inbox Microsoft Outlook access to tasks via RSS Copyright 2008, Active Endpoints, Inc. Page 20 of 21

21 Preserving Comment History across multiple People Activities ActiveVOS has the ability to add unstructured information to human tasks in the form of comments. ActiveVOS recognizes that these comments can often be applicable to more than the task to which they were initially added. Support retrieving comments from tasks and passing comments to the construction of new tasks Allow virtual tasks that span more than one human task while preserving their collective information Summary/Conclusion ActiveVOS is everything you need and nothing more. To learn more about ActiveVOS, visit Quick Intro where you can see ActiveVOS demonstrated. Use Product Info to learn more about ActiveVOS and how to use it to solve your problems. Visit our Features page to see a detailed list of ActiveVOS features. Refer to In Depth to obtain a deeper understanding of the technologies inside ActiveVOS. We also invite you to read our white papers. About Active Endpoints Active Endpoints ( is the leading developer of Visual Orchestration Systems. VOS empowers line of business project teams to create applications using services and industry standards, making their businesses more agile and effective. Active Endpoints ActiveVOS is the first product family to promote mass adoption of SOA-enabled applications by focusing on accelerating project delivery time with a standards-based, easy to use system. Active Endpoints is headquartered in Waltham, MA with development facilities in Shelton, CT. To find out how Active Endpoints can help your business, visit call , or us at sales@active-endpoints.com. Copyright 2008, Active Endpoints, Inc. Page 21 of 21