Extended Workflows features in Business Process Manager

Hi All,

I need an advice from Documentum experts. To the moment I have only Documentum Developer Edition 6.6. My task will be to write a software that provides communication between Documentum Content Server and an another document flow management system. Partially, the software will have to process situations when a workflow started in Documentum, then being sent to the ‘external system’ to be processes on their size; then comes back to Documentum (with modifications) etc.

I know there is additional product named Business Process Management. I know that the BPM supports ‘outbound’ and ‘inbound’ activities. Such activities exist for the communication I need – with external organization.

Do I understand right that the ‘outbound’ and ‘inbound’ activities are not described in the documentation that comes with Developer Edition (the only one that I have now)? If so, I have to buy BPM license to take a look at corresponding docs, correct?

Also: does someone know if the BPM contains something else (in addition to the inbound/outbound activities and 'messaging' for them) that could be used in this my task?

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tambrulee

Hi -

You'll need to look into Process Integrator too. It should be useful for the inbound/outbound activities in your case.

Regards,

Fiona

Sent wirelessly from my BlackBerry device on the Bell network.

Envoyé sans fil par mon terminal mobile BlackBerry sur le réseau de Bell.

Miller-zzMST

Hi!

All information you can find in the xCP Information Center https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-8250. About inbound/outbond capabilities you also can find in the Process Builder User Guide (chapter Delivered activity templates). PB is included in Documentum xCP Developer Edition (your's DevEdition doesn't includes it).

By the way Process Builder formerly known as Business Process Manager.

Regards,

Konstantin

GlenLantz

I have read docs from the xCP Information Center - thank you. In the 'Mapping Process Data Elements' I see how packages from a message are macthed with packages in corresponding Workflow. But I have not found how message will tell about transition of the Activity. I mean situation when incoming message is response to Outbound message that had been sent earlier. Ffrom which fields of a message will we understand: should the Activity come along Forward flow, or Reject flow?

Also: suppose a message comes from an exteran organization in in response to Outbound message that had been sent earlier. the message contains Packages. Apparently documents from the Packages have to be Checked In, correct? But what if the corresponding documents in Documentum are checked out in the moment; or have been deleted?

DavidHaveman

We've had similar business needs, we handled this by having the document launch a workflow and wait in a specific queue when they are ready to be picked up by the external application. There is a job setup that monitors the queue and posts a message with details about the workflow to a message bus that the external app monitors. The external app then retrieves the message, which includes the document id, and the workflow id and some other minor meta data. After the document has been retrieved and processed the external application sends back one of three messages to forward the workflow to the next quere or end the process depending upon how successful the processing was.

When worrying about the document being deleted you have to really look at your business process for that. Is it a good business decision to let them delete the document(s) when they are in the middle of this workflow connected to an external application? In our case it isn't so we locked that down in our TBO.

GlenLantz

Thank you, this is interesting

You implemented this using Process Builder product; or with Documentum Content Server only?
The ‘specific queue’ you mentioned – is this Process Builder’s feature? I see the following in Documentum_Content_Server_66_Fundamentals.pdf:

The additional features supported in Process Builder are:

…

Work queues, to help manage work items

So, is this the ‘specific queue’ you used?

3."one of three messages to forward the workflow to the next quere or end the process depending upon how successful the processing was.”

‘to forward’, ‘end the process’ – apparently the ‘to reject’ is 3^rd message type, correct?

DavidHaveman

No problem,

The main workflow process was built with process builder, yes.

Yes, the queue i speak of is any regular work queue. We assign users to work queues that require user interacton, (99% of our queues) and then we have a couple of system queues to wait for various things, among them communications from an external application. This way you can really use any queue you want for your system queue, you just define it, make sure no normal users have access to it. To interact with the external app, we wrote a custom job in Java+DFC to watch this queue, and post items to an external message bus based on each dormant workitem+attachment set in the workflow.

So after this system queue, you can build a decision point into your workflow. The custom job can update a process variable, or other variable the workflow can see, and the decision point can use that to decide where to push the workflow

Good Luck