OOW - Oracle BPM Studio

Following an hands on lab regarding BPM Studio was really interesting for me, because I'm a firm believer of Oracle BPA Suite and I'm using it in day-to-day projects in Europe today.

So my big question was ... what's BPM Studio all about, and what will it offer that I don't already have when using Oracle BPA Suite. Well I have to say, I still don't know exactly how these 2 products will work together. So let's have a quick overview of the different parts of BPM that got my attention on performing the hands-on lab.

The big difference in BPM Studio is the different contexts in which users will work depending on their skill-set and their responsibilities within the team.

You have 3 kinds of views within the 'Eclipse'-environment - BPM Studio uses Eclipse as it's IDE - you can be a 'Business Analyst', a 'Business Architect' or a 'Business Developer'.
Depending on your responsibilities and your view you will get a different context within the IDE so only those components, views and perspectives are shown that are of importance for your skill-set.

The ability to add swimlanes, add activies, add components is more straight-forward than in BPA, but you're not really using the BPMN Specs and best practices your used to working with as a BPMN Engineer.

When you've defined your process flow you can already test it, simulate it, within the environment and follow the process lifecycle using dashboards, charts, ...

So the big value is that within one environment you have all the different artifacts you need to define a process, to deploy a process, to simulate a process (using KPI's) and to monitor the process' execution.

I will need to take a look at it to be able to have a clear comparison of strengths and weaknesses of both environments to be able to see the value in both of these products.