New WebIDE: Will it breathe life to the BPM tool

[Sharathmg]

SAP BPM tool can find its roots to about 5 years ago with its Eclipse plugin. BPM was gaining traction across the various solutions and SAP was also on the bandwagon promoting its new toolsets and integration with the Web Dynpro Java User interfaces. The product was appreciated but not consumed by the clients. Will the new version of BPM tool through the Web IDE breathe life to the BPM process designing toolset? Will it be BPM 2.0?

BPM facilitates process design to incorporate custom business processes. The business workflow design in SAP GUI is close to the business models. The frontend BPM tool is to incorporate the Web User interfaces and promote a design which shall be part of the frontend portal. The tool is targetted at business experts who need minimal technical training to perform the process design. Additional to the process design, there is the need for a Rules Engine. Rules Engine is a frontend server engine which allows us to custom design rules to fulfill the actual business process design. Rules provide the flexibility to the process flow. he multiple provides of BPM tools provide both the processing tool and rules engine which a flexible editor to perform our process design.

The new BPM plugin tool is being made available with SAP Web IDE Full Stack version. In this version has a simple editor akin to Flowchart designer which allows the designer to incorporate custom process design. The various events allow the user to define the feasible events in the process flow.



The Gateways provide the designer the flexibility to branch the process flow and incorporate the custom flow based on certain conditions.



The tasks allow the designer to identify the various steps in the process flow. The steps could involve user activity ex: Request creation/Request approval etc. The step could also involve a backend service execution or a script run.



The option to incorporate the custom rules is provided as a JavaScript in the proviject. The rules script is automatically inserted into the project.



The User activity involves assignment of the UI5 screen/application to the activity in the process. The details tab allows the designer to provide the details of the UI. It also provides the option to assign users and groups. This is an important feature in process flow as it mostly involves different users with varies levels of authorizations.



 

The toolset is new and a couple of tutorials are available with the new version of Web IDE which should be officially released for production in the near future.

As a designer, I am looking forward to making use of this tool for productive use for real-time scenarios.