• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
TSB Alfresco Cobrand White tagline

Technology Services Group

  • Home
  • Products
    • Alfresco Enterprise Viewer
    • OpenContent Search
    • OpenContent Case
    • OpenContent Forms
    • OpenMigrate
    • OpenContent Web Services
    • OpenCapture
    • OpenOverlay
  • Solutions
    • Alfresco Content Accelerator for Claims Management
      • Claims Demo Series
    • Alfresco Content Accelerator for Policy & Procedure Management
      • Compliance Demo Series
    • OpenContent Accounts Payable
    • OpenContent Contract Management
    • OpenContent Batch Records
    • OpenContent Government
    • OpenContent Corporate Forms
    • OpenContent Construction Management
    • OpenContent Digital Archive
    • OpenContent Human Resources
    • OpenContent Patient Records
  • Platforms
    • Alfresco Consulting
      • Alfresco Case Study – Canadian Museum of Human Rights
      • Alfresco Case Study – New York Philharmonic
      • Alfresco Case Study – New York Property Insurance Underwriting Association
      • Alfresco Case Study – American Society for Clinical Pathology
      • Alfresco Case Study – American Association of Insurance Services
      • Alfresco Case Study – United Cerebral Palsy
    • HBase
    • DynamoDB
    • OpenText & Documentum Consulting
      • Upgrades – A Well Documented Approach
      • Life Science Solutions
        • Life Sciences Project Sampling
    • Veeva Consulting
    • Ephesoft
    • Workshare
  • Case Studies
    • White Papers
    • 11 Billion Document Migration
    • Learning Zone
    • Digital Asset Collection – Canadian Museum of Human Rights
    • Digital Archive and Retrieval – ASCP
    • Digital Archives – New York Philharmonic
    • Insurance Claim Processing – New York Property Insurance
    • Policy Forms Management with Machine Learning – AAIS
    • Liferay and Alfresco Portal – United Cerebral Palsy of Greater Chicago
  • About
    • Contact Us
  • Blog

Alfresco – Activiti Workflow Thoughts

You are here: Home / Activiti / Alfresco – Activiti Workflow Thoughts

January 5, 2012

In a previous post, we discussed how Alfresco compares to Documentum for managing Controlled Documents.  A big part of the controlled document process is the workflow engine used for review and approval.  This post will go into more detail on Activiti, the workflow engine used in Alfresco 4.0.

Activiti was first announced in May 2010 by Alfresco.  While Alfresco officially launched Activiti, the product is managed independently and is completely open source, licensed under the Apache License. What this means is that not only can you leverage Activiti as part of Alfresco’s ECM platform, but it can also be used as a BPM platform on it’s own.

For our Controlled Documents proof of concept, we successfully launched Activiti workflows using  HPI and Active Wizard running against an Alfresco repository.   During the project, there were a number of items that impressed us about Activiti:

  • Activiti is pure java, which is nice for us given that most of our development is Java-based.  Activiti also has great integration with Spring Framework, which makes configuration easy.  This means that if we need to customize tasks, auto activities, etc., we can rely on Java APIs to get the job done.
  • Activiti is based on the BPMN 2.0 standard.  Relying on a standards-based product is a key to having a choice of many different 3rd party tools for items such as process modelers, as well as integrations into other 3rd party systems.
  • Activiti utilizes XML-based templates.  This is nice for the Active Wizard, given that we need to generate a workflow template based on the rules evaluation process.  It’s much easier for us to generate the template in XML, versus using a proprietary API.
  • Activiti can be clustered for robust scaling.  If you’re using Activiti embedded within Alfresco, Activiti will scale right along with your Alfresco instance.  If you’re using Activiti as a standalone workflow engine, it can be scaled just like any other J2EE web application.
  • Activiti provides nice reporting tools that detail workflow templates, in-flight workflow processes, outstanding tasks and more.

Given the results of the POC, clients that are using Alfresco should check out the TSG Learning Zone.  All of the demos that show workflow review and approval could be applied to an Alfresco repository as well as Documentum.  Given that Activiti can be deployed as a standalone product, our Documentum clients looking for advanced BPM capabilities should evaluate Activiti as an open source alternative to EMC’s proprietary BPM product contained within xCP.

Filed Under: Activiti, Alfresco, OpenContent Forms, OpenContent Management Suite, Product Suite

Reader Interactions

Trackbacks

  1. Alfresco or Documentum – Dynamic Workflow in Active Wizard « TSG Blog says:
    January 6, 2012 at 8:03 am

    […] Open Source CMS Solutions BlogAbout « Alfresco – Activiti Workflow Thoughts […]

    Reply
  2. Activiti BPM Engine – Active Wizard 5.0 « TSG Blog says:
    November 13, 2012 at 8:02 am

    […] Active Wizard, check out this post from earlier this year, which we wrote after we had posted our initial thoughts about Activiti.  In this post, we will review how Dynamic workflow has worked in the Active Wizard in the past, […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

Search

Related Posts

  • Documentum and Alfresco BPM – Activiti and Active Wizard 5.0
  • Migrating from Documentum to Alfresco – Controlled Documents – Introducing Active Wizard 5.0
  • Document Review and Approval – Why Form AND Workflow are so important
  • Alfresco and Box – An Integrated Approach for Collaboration and Approval
  • Enhancing Alfresco Share with HPI 2.1 – Summary of Series Posting
  • Enhancing Alfresco Share with HPI 2.1 – Document Workflow
  • Alfresco 2013 Summit – Recap
  • Documentum – EMC World/Momentum 2013 – TSG Recap
  • Documentum, SharePoint, Alfresco – Document Control for Life Sciences
  • Documentum to Alfresco Migration – TSG Compliance Solution for Regulated Industries

Recent Posts

  • Alfresco Content Accelerator and Alfresco Enterprise Viewer – Improving User Collaboration Efficiency
  • Alfresco Content Accelerator – Document Notification Distribution Lists
  • Alfresco Webinar – Productivity Anywhere: How modern claim and policy document processing can help the new work-from-home normal succeed
  • Alfresco – Viewing Annotations on Versions
  • Alfresco Content Accelerator – Collaboration Enhancements
stacks-of-paper

11 BILLION DOCUMENT
BENCHMARK
OVERVIEW

Learn how TSG was able to leverage DynamoDB, S3, ElasticSearch & AWS to successfully migrate 11 Billion documents.

Download White Paper

Footer

Search

Contact

22 West Washington St
5th Floor
Chicago, IL 60602

inquiry@tsgrp.com

312.372.7777

Copyright © 2023 · Technology Services Group, Inc. · Log in

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. Please accept this site's cookies, but you can opt-out if you wish. Privacy Policy ACCEPT | Cookie settings
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT