Architect Consultant blog

I see it in a lot of projects but also I see that it is handled just like testing in the beginning: "oh we estimate some extra days and we also go Mobile !" Of course this is not the case, it can be a project on its own. There are a lot of choices to be made, some of them are: Which mobile platforms do we have to support? What are the performance requirements? Do we want to develop once, run anywhere? Do we want to use native functions of the mobile OS? What I also see, is that more and more BPM/Integration platforms are going to support it. But then again the Mobile experience is somewhat different than the Browser (and Desktop) experience. So depending on the requirements of the Mobile App, the platform can suffice or not. I will shortly describe some platform examples. OpenText Assure This is a BPM platform that supports Mobile. However the UIs are running within the browser app of the mobile device. The advantage is that it is developed once, and...

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...

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

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 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 ...

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.

This is my last week in a Cordys project I did.. It was a high pressure Cordys Case Management project with an Agile approach. The things I learned (again) and in random order: You need Cordys consultants Introspection after each iteration Invest in automatic testing Invest in setting up your Services Invest in the Domain Model Requirement management (user stories) Consult a scrum master Assign responsibilities Cordys consultants The Cordys (BOP4.1) still contains bugs and this is not remarkable given the young produkt. However this means that you need to know if it is a programming error or a Cordys bug. For this you really need a Cordys  consultant who really knows the core produkt.  Introspection  Within each (Agile) project you will have difficulties with the development process. This is not a problem as long as you are open for introspection. This will help the project in what goes wrong and what goes well. If you do not do this then the process wi...

Today i saw a CDATA text within the BPM i used with the file poller. With the file poller you can trigger a webservice. In this case i triggered a executeProcess. Below a small part of the configuration of this polling mechanism.

Today I wanted to change the title of a UI, but could not find where the current title was set. I looked into the properties and settings of the XForms, but no succes. In the runtime the title I saw was: "Aanvraag Documenten" but the fields i saw were not: Name Description Caption I also looked at the corresponding JScript of the XForms and searched for setCaption. But also no success. Finally thanks to a tip of a colleague i found it. It was at the calling XForm that used the following construction: I would recommend to use the Caption field of the XForm itself, so that the title is always the same and in one place, unless of course you want the caption to be dynamic.

Monitoring Within an enterprise and on your processes you want monitoring. Monitoring is used to for example: View the number of ongoing processes and its status If certain KPI's are met Triggering other processes when a certain event takes place Cordys supports this in the form of BAM and uses certain constructs for this. In this Blog i will describe a small example on how to set up BAM and how to create Dashboards. It gives an idea on how this can be done in Cordys. I use the following picture in which the created Cordys artifacts are displayed. Step 1 - Create a webservice This step is not described here, but a webservice can be generated from a BPM, database or an external service can be used for example. Next i will use this webservice to create a Business Measure artifact. Step 2 - Create a Business Measure A Business Measure helps in measuring a particular aspect of a business process or any external data. The Business Measure provides a view on the...

Previous week I got my Cordys Fundamentals Certification and I will explain how to prepare for this exam. Of course it depends on the number of years/months experience you already have with the produkt. In my case i have done several projects already and i have almost three years experience. The certification has three parts: Multiple choice questions Handson Interview The most difficult part is the Multiple choice questions. This requires some study and this can be found on the Wiki. This gives a good overview of the questions you can expect. In the handson part you get a couple of questions which you must make. You have 5 days for the questions and these are relatively easy. I suggest you do the Fundamentals training online which is available on the Wiki. In case you already have project experience then even this is not needed. Within the interview you need to explain your solution of the handson and this is also easy if you made the questions yourself of course. Th...

When i use IE9 to run Cordys 4.1 i run into a white screen. This can be avoided by running the explorer in IE8 mode. This can be done in the following way. Start IE9 Press F12 Go to Menu Document Mode and select the IE8 mode Close the window again and reload the Cordys page

This year's Cordial was held on the 9th and 10th October in Putten. The yearly event is getting more popular because it was packed. Some of the highlights for me: A couple of very entertaining presentations with content. Must see: Freek Vermeulen  on why organisations find it so difficult to change. Magnus Lindkvist  on the present and future trends Meeting a lot of interesting people in the BPM field Partner dinner with excellent food Nice to hear that integration and BPM skills are still very much needed in the future :-) See the CEO of Cordys in person Presentation of CIZ of a project with Cordys Case Management. With  Ciber  i also participated within that project. So it was nice to hear of the succes The partnership of Cordys and Aquima . A business rule engine that can be used seeming less with Cordys And of course more can be found on  http://www.cordys.com/resources Looking forward to it again next year!

Introduction I have read a book about Test Driven Development written by Kent Beck. This is a very famous and good book about test driven development with Java. This technique can also be adapted when developing a Service Oriented Architecture or implementing BPMs. For example with Cordys. This blog describes some guidelines. Some Guidelines Be sure to write your BPMs with as less context as possible This means that the context should be given as a parameter for example. In this case you can use soapUI or SOATester to test the BPM independently of the other BPMs. Each time there is an error within the BPM, be sure to write a test case for the error that shows the error After that solve the error and this way the test set also becomes bigger. Just like with the technique described within the book, you can start with writing the soapUI scripts first and then implement the BPMs This way your test cases should represent the exact requirements for the BPMs. These are just ...

Book Give-away: Hold a chance to win free copy of the 'Oracle SOA Infrastructure Implementation Certification Handbook (1Z0-451)' just by commenting! For the contest we have two copies of Oracle SOA Infrastructure Implementation Certification Handbook (1Z0-451) to be given away to two lucky winners. How you can win: To win your copy of this book, all you need to do is come up with a comment below highlighting the reason "why you would like to win this book”. Duration of the contest & selection of winners: The contest is valid for 30 days, and is open to everyone. Winners will be selected on the basis of their comment posted. Also please don't forget to mention your email adres within the comment. About the book: http://www.packtpub.com/ oracle-soa-infrastructure- implementation-certification- handbook/book   Oracle SOA Infrastructure Implementation Certification Handbook (1Z0-451) is w ritten by Kathiravan Udayakumar, who is...