Column 2

Summed up in Anatoly's final line: "don’t use BPMS to document a sequence of activities performed by a single person". I've seen this done a lot, particularly where process modeling/engineering types are documenting processes in detail; they often have a hard time rolling that up to the view of a process that a BPMS will actually execute.

A set of links to Oracle online SOA/BPEL/ESB resources, including documentation.

Keeping it simple in BPM projects in order to deploy something sooner (or at all). I'm a big fan of this approach, too: simple UIs and simple integration on the first go around, then target the ones that will have the most impact for subsequent deployments. Unfortunately, if you're dealing with an enterprise that insists on having everything in V1 because they usually don't get a V2, it will be hard to break the pattern of over-building.

Sample of how to add human tasks to an ActiveVOS BPEL process.

Keith Swenson's comments on the Process Wiki and the use of collaborative process modeling. As he points out, you can upload an XPDL file and it will be rendered visually on the process wiki page.

Process Wiki: best practices on business process modeling, including many industry standard business process models designed in BPMN. Everyone can upload or revise business processes. Via Keith Swenson. Unfortunately, home page is broken in Chrome.

Good commentary: "the most painful abuse is the case where the company has a wiki and users upload MS Word and PDF files as attachments rather than edit the content in the pages. Doing this degrades your wiki into a poor man’s shared drive". Be sure to link through to the article on PDF versus HTML for intranet content that is linked within.

Apparently, blogs are not dead. In fact, it appears that many companies have just discovered that some of them contain valuable information.