It is often useful to simultaneously spawn multiple work item instances in a process based on the contents of individual items in an array. One example of how this might be useful is when you need to send many people notifications simultaneously and you want each individual to receive their own work item instance to acknowledge.

Just as there are trends in business, one of the trends I keep seeing in business processes is the need to automatically generate PDFs based on information gathered by the process.  In this, I'll step through how to have a process automatically generate customized PDFs that can be attached to instances and / or emailed to clients.

Pretend for a moment, that you are a brand new BPM project manager tasked to head your company's first BPM project.  The BPM software vendor has just finished  their one week proof of concept (where they made everything look incredibly easy) and your company is in the final phase of negotiation with the software company. 

Recently on the blogosphere and on Oracle Technical Network (OTN), there have been posts asking about Oracle BPM's support for BPMN 2.0. How can any vendor claim to support a standard that has not yet been finalized?

I’m pretty well known for carrying everything I think I need on a project in my backpack. I carry dry erase markers, an extension cord, several thumb drives (I’m always losing them), a network cable and even beef jerky to survive the meal deficient flights. To paraphrase the comedian George Carlin - I simply feel more comfortable carrying all my stuff everywhere I go.

I'm sitting in the Denver airport just after what they hope is their last major snowstorm of year.   I was brought in this morning to help a company evaluate BPM software.   My BPM evaluation meeting was cancelled due to the snow (I thought everyone here drove 4 wheel drive vehicles) and had some time to think about the processes different customers take when evaluating BPM products.  Brandon Dean previously wrote a blog post on prep

Oracle BPM 10g FDI (Fuego Directory Interface) Hybrid configuration enables authentication and authorization to be delegated to Microsoft Active Directory while the rest of the metadata needed by Oracle BPM resides in the FDI database managed by Oracle BPM.  Discussed here are recommendations on how and where the directory information should be created, maintained and synchronized to ensure participants have their correct permissions.

If you have an end user who has turned on the option in the Workspace to receive emails, then the downside is that they will automatically receive an email for the work item instances that reach their Oracle BPM WorkSpace inbox.  This is not a good option for someone who receives many instances every day.

If you want to customize the standard email Oracle BPM automatically sends end users if they have turned on this option, look at the activityNotification.mail file located inside your <OracleBPMEnterpriseInstallationDirectory>\conf directory. 

Inside Oracle BPM logic, you can catch exceptions using logic like this:

Here are a few links that might help if you are just getting started with Oracle BPM. 

Oracle Product Management's Oracle BPM main page

Oracle Technical Network's (OTN) Oracle BPM forum - You can ask any type of question about Oracle BPM on this forum.