OpenSAM is Promising

The Office 2.0 Bug Tracker created more than a year ago is not evolving much these days, and there is a very simple reason for that: most of the bugs that have been identified early on, such as the lack of a proper infrastructure for single sign-on across applications, or the inability to copy-and-paste data from one to another, have yet to be fixed. Nevertheless, some dedicated folks are working hard to fix them, and among them my friends Eric Hoffert and Tom Snyder, founders of ShareMethods and iNetOffice respectively. Together with other Office 2.0 companies, they have created the OpenSAM consortium, which aims at developing the standards that will fix these bugs once and for all. What follows is an article contributed by Eric. [Continue…]

Get Your BPMN Schema Today

In a recent article published by Intelligent Enterprise, my friend Bruce Silver laments that BPDM is essentially useless, and that the BPM industry badly needs an XML schema for BPMN. I could not agree more with him, and I am happy to report that Intalio recently donated such a schema to the Eclipse Foundation, complemented by a ridiculously-good-looking object model for it. Not only did we give the schema away for free, but we also donated a complete implementation for it. [Continue…]

Where BPM and ECM Intersect

Following my recent post on the excellent Koral, several astute readers have asked what the integration points between Business Process Management (BPM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) could or should be, and whether some industry standards were available in this intersection area. Here is a first shot at answering the question. [Continue…]

Inferences for ‘07

Last year’s inferences lead to an unexpectedly high 83% success rate. This will be hard to beat, especially because my new batch of nine inferences will be stated in more measurable ways, leaving little room for history rewriting. Let’s give it a shot anyway, and meet again on December 31st, 2007 for our yearly performance review. In the meantime, happy new year to all! [Continue…]

Scorecard

364 days ago, I published my inferences for ‘06. A year has passed, and time has come to take a look back and see how good (or bad) I did back then. Tomorrow, I will publish a new batch, and review them a year from now. [Continue…]

SAP TechEd

Following SAPPHIRE back in May, I have been invited by the good folks at SAP (Mike Prosceno, Stacey Fish) to cover SAP Teched ‘06, which will take place in Las Vegas, on September 11-15. I have had an awesome time blogging with the other Enterprise Irregulars in Orlando, and it’s with great pleasure that I accepted the invitation. Here is what I expect to learn there. [Continue…]

What went Wrong with J2EE

Three months ago, I explained what I thought was wrong with J2EE. More recently, a lot of controversy was stirred when J2EE developer extraordinaire Richard Monson-Haefel, now a senior analyst with the Burton Group, predicted the death of the J2EE architecture in a SOA-dominated world. [Continue..]

XForms 1.1 is Coming

In a recent post, James Governor talked about the upcoming XForms 1.1 specification and how IBM is supporting it in Workplace, refering to an article written by John Boyer, Senior Product Architect for IBM Workplace Forms and co-chair of the XForms working group. Intalio is using Orbeon’s open source implementation of XForms for Intalio|Workflow, and I asked my good friend Alessandro Vernet what their plans were regarding version 1.1 of the specification. Here is a transcript of his answer. [Continue…]

The World is Flat

I just finished reading The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times columnist and author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree. In his last book, Friedman identifies ten events and trends that are flattening the world we live in today. I agreed with most of the thesis, and tried to relate to it my own experience working at Intalio.

BPM Inferences for ‘06

This is my first monthly BPM column for Business Process Trends. In order to set the stage for a new year of BPM, here is a set of inferences for ‘06 based on my personal experiences, insights and desires. Some are fairly straightforward, others highly speculative, but most should matter to all BPM practitioners. Interestingly enough, the first inference—BPM will go mainstream—got a step closer to being fulfilled this morning: IBM just announced the release of the new System i5, also known as iSeries, also known as AS/400. As part of this announcement they are featuring a front & center quote from yours truly. Intalio|BPMS becomes the first BPM solution to be available for System i5, and if that does not make BPM mainstream, I do not know what will.

Interoperability and Service Cascading

One of the great things about industry standards is interoperability. For BPM, having a process designer based on BPMN allows us to import process models from other tools such as IDS-Scheer ARIS, while adopting BPEL for process execution gives our customers the ability to deploy their processes on our process server as well as IBM’s or Oracle’s. The same is true with Office 2.0, and here is an example of service interoperability in action.

BAM Redux

The concept of Complex Event Processing (CEP) promoted by Stanford Professor David Luckham seems to be gaining some good traction. David Cameron has a nice introduction on the subject. What I like about the approach is that it complements the more rigid Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) capabilities that are offered by today’s BPM systems. […]

Inferences for ‘06

Happy New Year to all!
Everybody does it, so here are my inferences for ‘06:
BPMS will go mainstream
With BPEL gaining support for distributed transactions and human workflow while BPMN is receiving the blessing of the OMG, industry standards are making the BPMS ready for mainstream adoption. Just in time for Gartner to release the first BPMS magic quadrant […]

The BPMS: Hampered by a Common Language?

A particular curse of emerging technologies like BPM is that all the vendors feel forced to tell their story using the same set of features, benefits, and promises to the business—predictably taken from some Gartner report published early in the hype cycle. But as the technology becomes less emerging and the assortment of available offerings […]

Will SCA make things simpler?

One problem with SOA is that the first initial does not yet stand for ‘Simple’, as was the case for SOAP, the Simple Object Access Protocol—even though SOAP quickly became quite complex itself over time. Distributed systems are inherently complex and marketing hype can only go that far.
Part of the problem is that services do not […]

What is BPEL good for?

A lot of people have complained that BPEL is not appropriate for the modeling of business processes and does not provide support for human workflow. They are right! But instead of complaining about it, they really should rejoice that BPEL, as an execution language for business processes, is a pretty darn good specification that does […]

Standardization

Welcome to IT|Redux

IT|Redux—New Rules for a New IT World, is a weblog dedicated to the IT industry and the radical trends that are transforming it today. IT|Redux is the brainchild and playground of Ismael Ghalimi, a passionate entrepreneur and fervent industry observer, founder of Intalio and BPMI.org.
IT|Redux identifies three major trends that are in play today and are […]