• 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

Productization of Alfresco Activiti (and the Standalone Activiti BPMN Suite)

You are here: Home / Activiti / Productization of Alfresco Activiti (and the Standalone Activiti BPMN Suite)

December 30, 2014

During Alfresco Summit 2014, Alfresco announced they would begin offering Activiti, their popular workflow and BPM engine, as a separate product offering complete with web interface for building and deploying workflows called the Activiti BPMN Suite.

Previous versions of Activiti were able to be used without an Alfresco installation. In previous years, TSG converted all of our Active Wizard workflows to Activiti, which run on both Alfresco and Documentum. The big news about 2014’s announcement is the Activiti workflow engine will now be offered with a front end web application, allowing users to create and modify workflow templates on the fly and start ad hoc workflows from any web browser.

This Activiti BPMN Suite can be previewed for 30 days here.

The Activiti web application
The Activiti web application

The Activiti BPMN Suite offers two tools for designing workflows:

  1. The step editor, which allows the savvy business user to design their own workflows without writing a bit of code, and
  2. The BPMN graphical editor, which allows developers to create workflows in the same manner as the soon-to-be-outdated Eclipse Activiti designer
The Activiti Step Editor
The Activiti Step Editor
Activiti BPMN Designer
Activiti BPMN Designer

The web application is very slick – built on AngularJS – and provides the benefits of designing workflows on the fly, avoiding installing the memory hogging Eclipse designer and enabling business users to design their own workflows without the assistance of a developer. Form fields can call REST endpoints for value assistance and users can design the flow quickly. The BPMN template can then be downloaded and used for more traditional deployment scenarios.

After creating our own 30 day trial accounts and testing the new web application, here are our thoughts:

What we like:

  • Web based, avoiding using the Eclipse plugin
  • Both editors provide validators that will check your workflow logic whenever you save
  • BPMN editor provides a tour for learning
  • Quick workflow prototyping
  • A visual, “demoable” tool to show clients

Our concerns:

  • Both the Step Editor and the BPMN designers are well done, but both would be a big learning curve for people not familiar with BPMN.
  • If the Eclipse designer is deprecated, will developers still be able to work offline?
  • From a user experience perspective, the main navigation changes very often, making it difficult to get around the application. Also when using the step editor, adding an upload form field does not carry the document automatically to the next step.

We are looking forward to the “BPMNaaS” offering of Activiti. TSG has a lot of Activiti experience, both within Alfresco and using it as a standalone engine. TSG can provide consulting services for the powerful standalone engine, which can allow clients to convert their workflows to Activiti without having to change repositories.

Filed Under: Activiti, Alfresco, BPMN

Primary Sidebar

Search

Related Posts

  • Alfresco Activiti – Overview of BPMN Suite
  • Document Review and Approval – Why Form AND Workflow are so important
  • Alfresco and Angular 2.0: Technical First Look
  • Alfresco Summit 2014 Recap
  • 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
  • Documentum and Alfresco BPM – Activiti and Active Wizard 5.0
  • Documentum – EMC World/Momentum 2013 – TSG Recap
  • Activiti BPM Engine – Active Wizard 5.0

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