What is Workflow Patterns?

Today, I found out about workflow patterns which are done by initiative is a joint effort of Eindhoven University of Technology (led by Professor Wil van der Aalst) and Queensland University of Technology (led by Professor Arthur ter Hofstede) which started in 1999. These patterns which has grown from 20 to 40, has been adopted by major BPM players such as IBM, oracle and others BPM vendors. They also responsible for the creation of YAWL which a language and workflow engine, implemented in java.

According to the site, there are four major type of workflow patterns:

1. Control-flow pattern – (captures aspects related to control-flow dependencies between various tasks (e.g. parallelism, choice, synchronization etc) 
2. Data pattern - deals with the passing of information , scoping of variables, etc (more for programming purposes) 
3. Resource pattern - deals with resource to task allocation, delegation, etc. 
4. Error handling pattern - deal with the various causes of exceptions and the various actions that need to be taken as a result of exceptions occurring 

And what are we doing for our workflow software are very much related on resource pattern. Our Hydra workflow are very much specialized in resource pattern workflow as we deals with delegation of task, and routing of workitems (a term we use in our workflow system to denotes workflow process). Apparently there are tons of ways to describe these human centric workflow. Among these are :

a. Creation Patterns:

• Direct Distribution
• Role-Based Distribution
• Deferred Distribution
• Authorization
• Separation of Duties
• Case Handling
• Retain Familiar
• Capability-Based Distribution
• History-Based Distribution
• Organisational Distribution
• Automatic Execution

b. Push Patterns

• Distribution by Offer - Single Resource
• Distribution by Offer - Multiple Resources
• Distribution by Allocation - Single Resource
• Random Allocation
• Round Robin Allocation
• Shortest Queue
• Early Distribution
• Distribution on Enablement
• Late Distribution

c. Pull Patterns

• Resource-Initiated Allocation
• Resource-Initiated Execution - Allocated Work Item
• Resource-Initiated Execution - Offered Work Item
• System-Determined Work Queue Content
• Resource-Determined Work Queue Content
• Selection Autonomy

d. Detour Patterns

• Delegation
• Escalation
• Deallocation
• Stateful Reallocation
• Stateless Reallocation
• Suspension-Resumption
• Skip
• Redo
• Pre-Do

e. Auto-Start Patterns

• Commencement on Creation
• Commencement on Allocation
• Piled Execution
• Chained Execution

f. Visibility Patterns

• Configurable Unallocated Work Item Visibility
• Configurable Allocated Work Item Visibility

g. Multiple Resource Patterns

• Simultaneous Execution
• Additional Resources

These are sure a long, long list of type of workflow patterns (43 items here). Well, I'm still at the process reading and understanding these patterns. Maybe in next coming article, i might come out on how to implement some these in our workflow system. Maybe we can't support all of it now but i believe a great percentage of them are achievable. 

So what you think of resource pattern workflow? And will this helps in real organization in terms helping organization dealing with process everyday? Do give us feedback on this. Till then, take care!

Business Process Management Meets Enterprise 2 0 (Slide)

Couple days ago, i stumble upon an article about collaborative BPM  which i found quite interesting. From that article i found this slides which did by Sandy Kemsley.

It certainly interesting article that mention how BPM vendors starts to incorporate social features into their product and how this would appeal to the newer generations of users. I wonder application like facebook and twitter changes behaviour of system users. Does they demand such features because they are exposed to these or those feature s enables to have more empowerment in their work? Do let me know what you think?

And yes, do enjoy the slides. :-D

Business Process Management Meets Enterprise 2 0

Next Generation LOB (Line of Business) Applications Slides

Found another slides on LOB (Line of Business) application and it's next generation of evolutions using Microsoft technologies. There's quite a short and concise overview on which technology to solve or new way of doing things in an LOB application.

Very interesting presentation and we are using some of it but not in the entirety which we can look forward to.

So what you think of these technologies developed by Microsoft? Are there better way of doing this? :-D

Next Generation LOB (Line of Business) Applications

Patterns For Cloud Computing Slides From Microsoft

Today, I found this presentation from aadjemonkeyrock (a blog which i follows). The title certainly intrigues me at first as we are very much into cloud computing. But beware, it's a pretty long presentation with over 180 pages but most are pictures not words.

This presentation I find quite interesting as it does explained what is cloud computing from Microsoft point of view. And Azure is the solutions for Microsoft technology adopter such like us. Certainly certain patterns are quite interesting such as concept of multi tenancy. It's also ironic that Google is mentioned on the presentation on the topic of MapReduce  and how this can be solve via Azure platform. Overall it's interesting presentation on the cloud computing roadmap from Microsoft.

But i think there are more plenty patterns implemented by other vendors. So what do you think on cloud computing patterns or roadmap? You can leave your comment here. :-D

Patterns For Cloud Computing

Happy Chinese New Year!!

Health makes all things possible,
Wealth makes all things work
Love makes all things beautiful.
May you all have all 3.

We would like to wish all of you a happy chinese new year!! Gong Xi Fatt Chai from all of us in Unispace!

Cloud Computing, in Plain English, to IT Directors, VP

Interesting article about cloud computing. In the video, it says clouds is powered by virtualizations. So which virtualization should we go to? open source or propriety? Let me know if you have any opinions. :-D

Building a Lean Startup

I come across an interesting and short presentation on Lean startup. As curious like usual, I checked out the slides and really like it. One point in the slides that mentioned are 1 day release that struck me the most. As we are practicing few weeks per release which kinda normal nowadays. So what you think of 1 day release cycle? :-D

And check out this SlideShare Presentation, cheers!

Building a Lean Startup

View more presentations from ashmaurya.

My encounter of Cross Domain for Silverlight 2.0

Today I ran into unusual problem. Today I want to transfer our Beta 0.7 version to testing server which we just recently bought. As it's works perfectly in my developer machine (does this sounds familiar  :p), so i happily transfer my databases and compiled files over to the new server.

Then i realized the URL is pointed as localhost and this works on local machine which I don't intend to test on the machine but over local network. So my past experience with ASP.Net, i can either connect to the newly setup website using IP address (eg. http://localhost/workflow7 to http://192.168.2.10/workflow7). Well it does show me the login page and after I login into, the unexpected happens. As we are developing in Silverlight and about that's about 90% of our current GUI, it stops working and I got this error, crossdomain error calling webservice which we using to communicate our UI layer with application layer. This is really puzzling as I already have the clientaccesspolicy.xml in my application folder. So I start to google about this and seem this is quite a common issue for Silverlight with web services.

Thus I’m really scratching my head and after intense 1 hour of searching, I found no solutions. I have tried crossdomain.xml after found . But still not working but if I switched back to localhost, then everything works again. This is surely frustrated. But after a good dinner and bath, I try my luck again in Google and i found this excellent article about setting cross domain for Silverlight workaround from Jon Galloway article which pointed me to correct direction about my issue. It got me to Tim Heuer blog  about clientaccesspolicy file. I read the whole the article and the last paragraph show my mistakes and it's so plain simple. Let me quote from the site about whereabouts of the file

"Either way, when you are done with the file, it needs to go in the ROOT of the domain.  This is important as it is not the application root, but the root web.  Even if your app is at foo.com/myapp, the policy file needs to be at foo.com/clientaccesspolicy.xml."

Root is the word I’m looking for and my file is located wrong place after all. So it should be at the root of the domain and after i copied the file over to my root domain which in this case is the default (wwwroot folder which i think is default folder used by 90% people  :-D). My application now is working now. I'm so relieve that I don't have to spend another few hours for this problem. So thanks to Jon and Tim for help me to solve my issue. So anyone else is having this issue? Do leave me a comment if you have similar issues and I see if I can help as well.

Have a nice day!

Happy New Year 2010!

Here at Unispace, we would like to wish everyone Happy New Year!! This year we will be releasing our beta real soon and will update everyone here about it.

We would like to wish everyone good health, plenty of 'Good Luck' and tons of happiness in coming year ahead. Have a blast 2010!