Architect Consultant blog

Op 27 en 28 november jongstleden ben ik voor de Computable naar het Landelijk Architectuur Congres 2013 geweest. Hierbij een kort verslag: http://www.computable.nl/artikel/expertverslag/architectuur/4941306/2204519/lac-2013-de-onderscheidende-architect.html

Introduction With the acquisition of Cordys this year, i was curious about the integration with OpenText. At the Enterprise World 2013 some insight is already given. This will be a short recap. You may also listen to Brian Wick here . Process Suite 10.5 Platform There was a tweet from @ ProcessRocksta r   that showed the content of the process suite platform of OpenText. It also shows that Cordys is rebranded to "OpenText Cordys 10.5". The platform and BPM offering of OpenText can be  visualized  as: The suite is composed of several components: OpenText Cordys 10.5 This is the core component of the suite with BPM and Case Management  Unified UI There comes a unified UI with HTML5 support that is integrated within BMPM, Case360, Process360 and Execute360 BPM Everywhere This is a new social platform that lets users collaborate on cases. AppWorks Gateway This gives a set of RESTfull APIs on top of OpenText EIM produkts to integrate th...

The previous two weeks I had two days of training on ArchiMate 2.0 from BizzDesign  and today I had my exam. I passed and it is a good addition to my knowledge as a Solution Architect. Exam The exam and the notation itself is not very difficult, especially when you already know UML. When you study the materials of BizzDesign, this should be enough. Go using it ... Now starts the harder part: actually using the language. There are a lot of tools that support the ArchiMate language. One of the free tools is Archi . Depending on you stakeholders you can design your vieuws and tell your architecture story.

Nowadays there are a lot of standard processes within healthcare, school and IT. That takes away our ability to think for ourselfs. I see that people use the processes as an excuse and do not think for themselves anymore. How can i help my customer for the best, or how can i teach this child for the best. I have read the following book of Barry Schwartz: Practical Wisdom I really liked the book and i can recommend it, because it gives inspiration to think about. How can i help my customer for the best? Is this the solution that will help my customer? I understand that we need rules, standards and processes, but that does not mean that those are the holy grail. That's why i like a more Agile approach than working out big plans, that may have changed before you even finished the plan. Sitting together with the customer thinking about the best solution at that time. Very inspiring book !

On Thursday the 12th of september I visited the Dream Event in Houten. This is a small recap of the event. Theme Dream stands for Dutch Requirement Engineering And Management and is the only event within the Netherlands specifically about Requirements. The event had some very interesting speakers, of which James Taylor is probably the most famous one. The presentations were very diverse and with some kind of relation towards requirements of course. James Taylor - Simpler, smarter and more agile processes His talk was about making processes simpler, smarter and more agile by using business rules. So looking at if-the-else constructions within the processes, that have high impact on the processes. Not the best presentation i have seen, but this is my personal opinion. It was very formal and not much new information for me. It should be common practive when you want to have your processes flexible and agile. I do understand though that this is probably not common sense in most o...

OpenText has bought Cordys. Some links: http://www.cordys.com/opentext http://www.opentext.com/2/global/company/news/press-releases/press-release-details.htm?id=66B58B6F88534A9CA41B4E14A6018C6A http://www.cmswire.com/cms/information-management/opentext-buys-cordys-offers-integrated-bpm-information-management-022146.php From these articles we can conclude for now that: OpenText wants to expand on BPM and Case Management OpenText want to become leader within Cloud and PaaS marketplace Cordys will be referred as OpenText Cordys  As a certified Cordys Solution Architect I wonder: What will remain of the Cordys produkts? How will current clients be supported by OpenText? What will be used of the strong Cordys Cloud proposition with its multi-tenant concept? Will the user interfaces of Cordys be adapted, so a uniform interface will be used on multiple process engines? How will Cordys be integrated within the current BPM offerings of OpenText Will Cordys get ...

I am a proud man ! Today i received my Cordys Solution Architect Certification. I am the first Certified Solution Architect and thats why what makes it so special. I started the certification program back in 2012 with the Cordys Solution Architect program. It was a three days course on several aspects of the Cordys BOP produkt. After that I got myself three certificates: * Cordys Fundamentals * Cordys BPMS * Cordys Solution Architect For each certification you had to go through three phases: theoretical exam, practical exam and an interview where you have to defend your practical solution. More can be read here:  https://wiki.cordys.com/display/cordyscert/Home

On Friday morning I left Geldrop for the Conference " Trends in BPM " in the picturesque town Hoevelaken. The theme this year was "Samenwerken in de keten: mens, methodes en impact" (Collaboration within the chain: people, methods and impact). It was held in the Koninginnestraat 1 at Intres. It was a very long street and each traffic sign said "1 straight ahead", but in the end the street ended and no nr 1 was found. Also not Intres. When I drove the whoel street for the third time and asked three people for Intres and nr 1, i finally parked my car at Euretco. I went inside to the reception and asked where i could find Intres. It appeared that the name Intres was renamed to Euretco, so in fact i was at the correct place! Maybe a hint to write the correct name on the invitations !? So I went inside and soon noticed that i was a little bit underdressed. This was my own fault, because most of the times these conferences are packed with suits. But ne...

When i installed Cordys Bop4.2 CU1 i ran into two problems which i wanted to share with you. My environment: Windows Server 8 R2, MySql 5.5, Java 1.7 I followed the installation documentation of Cordys:  https://wiki.cordys.com/display/bop42/Cordys+BOP+4.2+Documentation I was able to install CARS without any problems. The I installed BOP with default configurations. I had a clean database, so I let Cordys create the database, but then the installation failed with a "Could not execute database scripts". I contacted Cordys and this appeared to be a known bug. You have to create the database schema first: CREATE DATABASE %CordysDatabase% DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 DEFAULT COLLATE utf8_general_ci; GRANT ALL ON Cordys.* TO root IDENTIFIED BY '%password%'; So happy that this worked, I installed it again and it went fine. Until the base packages had to be installed. It failed with a NULL pointer exception with an error message I did not understand.  It turned...

Today i came accross an ESB of Kabisa ICT . They have a produkt called Kabisa ESB . This is a short blog item just to write down what i came to know about this ESB. Well first of all it is based on Apache Camel (for routing and mediation) and Apache Service Mix . Service Mix is an implementation of JBI (Java Business Integration) standard. On top of that Kabisa has made a graphical designer (FlowDesigner) to integrate your systems and to setup complex workflows and data streams. No more information on the site w.r.t FlowDesigner, so i asked for documentation. Hope to blog on this tool more soon ....

Friday i received my official Cordys BPMS Certification. With proud i present you: Next goal is the Cordys Solution Architect Certification ....

Tomorrow i have my first theoretical exam of the Cordys Solution Architect Certification . For this theoretical part you have to know: SOA CAF CWS Security parts I did not have much time to prepare the exam, so i am curious tomorrow.... The next part of this certification is a handson that takes 15 calendar days. The third part is that you give a presentation of a business case where you took part of as a Solution Architect. The fourth part is that you publish a new article, solution pattern, or best practice on the community. So a lot to go for, ....

Introduction One of my favorite tools is  TweetDeck , so in fact Twitter. I use TweetDeck to tweet what i am doing and thinking. But most of all i use it to see what is going on within the field. This blog item describes the way i use TweetDeck. Tips and Tricks Of course you need a TwitterAccount to tweet. 1 - Use Lists I follow a lot of people and therefore my stream is very large. So how can you filter your stream? You can create as much List as you like and assign twitter accounts to Lists. I use the Lists as follows. * I use list for Interesting tweets * People i know: Know You can add Twitter Accounts to Lists: Click on the Account 2 - Use Columns You can add Columns in which you can show all type of Tweets. I use it to show Lists i currently interested in or i use it for topics i currently interesting in. For example on Cordys. You select Add Column Select the Search and type Cordys Now you will see all tweets related to...

Introduction Oracle announced its new BPM 11.1.1.7 produkt. I found it interested that also (Adaptive) Case Management was added and i was curious what the difference is between the Oracle and Cordys approach w.r.t. Case Management. In this Blog item i will discuss some of the the differences and resemblance. Adapative Case Management Both Cordys and Oracle agree on the fact that there are processes that are not defined ahead and a knowledge worker can define the path as the case progresses. So that's good news. Also both in Oracle and Cordys the case management and normal BPMN processes can be mixed. Case Modelling  Oracle Users can define a Case and associate it with a set of Case Activities. In addition to Case activities, the Case definition consists of case data, case documents, case rules, case events, case milestones, case stakeholders, and case outcomes. The progression of a case is indicated via case milestones. A case milestone signifies completion ...

Like to pose some  misunderstandings about BPM. Maybe some BPM tool vendors will disagree and also some BPM consultancy firms, but then again this is my own humble opinion. Feel free to react, add your own, discuss. Lets begin with a delicate one. BPM makes my organisation flexible A lot of people will say that BPM makes your organization flexible. It can be the case but then there must hold a couple of pre-conditions: You must know where you want flexibility In this case you have to know the future and you do not know it. You must have a good IT SOA architecture This is needed to be flexible to define your processes. Using Services will enable reuse and consistency throughout the architecture It is only design time flexibility The statement that the business can change the process on the fly is mostly false. I have not seen it yet and is probably only a couple of configurations that can be changed so that parameters within the process are changed. This way you can steer...

Introduction Cordys servers are a very complicated environment including lot of different JVM's (java virtual machines) and lot of connections to databases and other external systems, and in a Cordys cluster, different Cordys instances. Therefore Cordys servers can run in trouble for many reasons, for example:         Maximum he ap memory exceeded     Broken connections     Load too high     Lack of memory     Slow database It is the task of Cordys administrators to maintain and monitor Cordys servers in production environments in order to meet the SLA requirements of customers. For every Cordys Service Container the administrator must do the following: Check if heap memory usage is not exceeding maximum memory Check if it is available and restart it if necessary Check the performance of its webservices Check the performance of the databases used by the service container Another task of the ...

Introduction Within your Cordys projects you have functional- and technical roles. These Roles can be used on services and in user interfaces to define ACLs (= Access Control Lists). This small blog describes a best practice of how to set up the Roles. Currently i always use it like this within my projects and it works fine. Roles In my opinion there is a big difference between a functional role and a technical role within Cordys. You can define both. "Is Functional Role" can be checked for a functional role. Functional Roles should be used for Roles that are known by the business. These are the Roles that are used within Business Processes. These are the Roles that are used to assign Tasks to. It is best practice to define functional roles within a separate Cordys project. Within the Functional Roles you can define the UIs that are allowed to be used by that Role. This has the consequence that there is a dependency from the Organisa...

This month i started the BPMS Certification of Cordys. I already have my Fundamentals Certification. My final goal is to get the Solution Architect Certification. The certification has three parts: Theoretical exam Handson exam Interview Within the theoretical exam you are supposed to answer 60 questions within 1 hour. The questions can be made online and are quite detailed. You really have to know your stuff. In fact in my first attempt i only got 71% and you have to get 75%. So i took it too lightly. The handson is one big case that you have to work out. It is also bigger (of course) than the exercises you get with the Fundamentals. You have 10 working days for the handson. After the handson you get an interview. In this interview you have to explain your solution and you get answers about the handson. Some tips: Really dive into the learning path. You do not really have to follow a training course, you can do it self paced.  Also install the Cordy...

Introduction In several projects I have been using Cordys BOP4 platform. I really like the multi-tenancy possibilities within the project. Also the Provisioning Component of the produkt is highly appreciated and used. However there is one thing that i sometimes run into. Chain integration Within the projects we have several Organisations that participate in the process of chain integration. They work with each other and they handover tasks to each other. However currently the modelling of such "inter Organisation processes" is not possible. You can sent tasks to other Organizations but you can not model this with BPMN models. This is a pitty because you loose the control and monitoring of the total process. Maybe you can customize this and implement it, but it is not present (yet??) in the Cordys project.