Tibco AMX BPM Tutorial

Welcome to Tibco AMX BPM Tutorials. The objective of these tutorials is to provide in depth understand of Tibco AMX BPM.

In addition to free Tibco AMX BPM Tutorials, we will cover common interview questions, issues and how to’s of Tibco AMX BPM.

Introduction

TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM is used to develop, deploy, execute and manage Business Process Management centric applications.TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM is a leading business process platform that coordinates a digital business process, people, context, and actions for better business outcomes. With flexible processes able to react to the right business events in real time, it meets all of an organization's business process needs. TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM helps you go beyond automation to digitalize your business.

TIBCO AMX-BPM is a unified platform that automates business processes, manages the distribution of work to people, and delivers actionable insight into process performance.

Designed to meet the needs of both the business and IT, it allows the business to successfully own process management while IT owns the supporting infrastructure. Business experts can manage processes as corporate assets and collaborate with IT to develop applications using a fast, iterative approach that delivers rapid time-to-benefit. Process and workforce management are separated to optimize the use of people and dynamically managing the work they perform. Built-in model-driven support for workflow patterns also allows processes to naturally adapt to the way people work

AMX BPM Architecture

The AMX BPM platform has five components – Workspace, Work Manager, Event Collector, Process Manager, and Openspace – wired together using public services, which allows anyone to use those same services to replace or augment the components. In fact, the BPM platform and AMX BPM applications are all just AMX composite applications.

There is a common administration interface for all AMX products, and when we’re in the AMX Admin interface, the common nature of the platform becomes more evident: you can see the AMX platform, AMX BPM, sample applications and organizational models that we’ll be looking at in the demo. Selecting the AMX BPM application, you’ll see the underlying five components as well as all public services available.

The AMX service governance and management tools share common components with AMX SOA, but are not included in AMX BPM.

What this new architecture means is that Business Studio can be used to create services using combinations of components, services and other object types, which allows processes to be embedded as part of any application: process is not a separate thing used to orchestrate applications, but part of the application itself.

ActiveMatrix Workspace

The ActiveMatrix Workspace is the web-based end-user environment, with views of the work available to the current user as well as views of the organizational model as discussed above. Taking a look at the work views, however, is where we see some of the first major changes to the underlying process engine: there are no more physical queues; rather, what appear as logical queues (or work lists) to users are created with dynamic queries. In the old days – and in the old architecture of iProcess and some of its competitors – segregating work items into explicit queues was necessary for performance reasons; today, faster hardware and in-memory software allows this to be done dynamically. When I think of all the times that I’ve have to work around queuing mechanisms in BPM systems, both for work assignment and reporting purposes, this is huge since it provides much easier slicing and dicing of the work items. For example, a standard work view for a supervisor would be “Supervised Work”, which shows all work items that are both available but not yet assigned to a user, plus those that have been allocated to specific users: in effect, a view of the unassigned and assigned work in progress, regardless of its logical queue location. Now, you could argue that queues in most BPMS are usually implemented as database constructs anyway, which is mostly true; however, access to work except by queue is often not very efficient in these queue-oriented systems.

In addition to the Work Views and Organization Browser, the Workspace includes the following user views:

-Business Services, which is a user view of process-based composite applications, so that user doesn’t think about kicking off a process, but about doing a business function. In the sample insurance scenario that we were looking at, this included functions such as “First Notice of Loss Notification”.

-Process Views, which shows a view of the executing processes.

-Event Views, which shows an administrator-like view of login/logout and other system events, plus events related to process instances such as access and update. This is tied closely to the Process Views, which links back to the Event Views in order to show instance events.

Business Object (Data) Models

TIBCO isn’t the first BPM vendor to jump on the process data model bandwagon, and they won’t be the last: the link between MDM and process instance data needs to be firmly established so that you don’t end up with data definitions within your BPMS that don’t match up with the other data sources in your organization.

In Business Studio, you can define a business object model – a sort of simplified UML data model – that allows structured data models to be shared within or across packages and applications The business object model can have subclasses as well as data relationships, and supports a hierarchy of data models. Even better, you can import it from UML, XSD, WSDL or directly from a database, and can export it to XSD or WSDL.

A business object model is then attached via an external reference to a process model to become part of the process instance data. Access control (in/out/bidirectional) can be set for that business object at each step in the process, as with any other instance parameter, in order to control whether the process step can read and write to the instance data defined by the business object. If you create scripts (which are Javascript in AMX BPM) to manipulate the instance data, the script editor will look up attributes and type directly from the business object model, which means that it’s fully-accessible instance data, not a blob that you need to decode manually.