Oracle BPM 11g (or BPEL)  uses XML to pass along process payload information.  To modify this information in a UI, BPM data controls are typically used to update this data from the ADF user interface. This is a well known technique and easy to do.  These data controls can be generated from the human task UI wizard or through the new gallery's "ADF Task Flow Based on Human Task", Figure 1.  So long as the UI uses the BPM's data controls, all is well.

Enterprise Manager is a great tool to track your BPM instances, but it can be difficult to determine which specific instance you are looking for.  For example, let’s say you have an application that allows you to book travel.  In order to find a particular travel request, you would need to do one of the following in Enterprise Manager:

There are many situations when building composite SOA services where we need to invoke several backend services in parallel for performance reasons.  Your first thought may be to use a flow activity in your BPEL process and this is correct, although to have the services truly invoked in parallel there are a few more steps that must be done.  A BPEL process is executed using a single thread, even when a flow is reached.  Each branch of the flow will then be executed sequentially.  The solution to this is to enable the nonBlockingInvoke property on your partner links.

Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) is Oracle's data integration platform engineered to provide fast and easy data transformation and data integration processes, through E-LT (Extract - Load Transform) mechanism, between different technologies.  For example, using ODI's transformation mechanism I can create daily snapshots of my data residing in an Oracle DB and store these snapshots in a XML format.  These XML snapshot files can serve as XML payloads for an external web-service to consume this data.