Extending composite applications with portal workflow processes.

Transcription

1 Integration solutions White paper December 2006 Extending composite applications IBM WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 software and business-process integration

2 Page 2 Contents 2 Introduction 5 Meeting everyday businessprocessing requirements 7 Accelerating the evolution to a more flexible, responsive organization 9 Building the foundation for a more flexible infrastructure: SOA and Web services 13 Helping to maximize employee productivity, partner relationships, customer loyalty and lifetime value 18 Workflow builder, Lotus Expeditor software and business-process integration: options to enable portal process driven operations 20 The IBM WebSphere Portal platform architecture 24 Details about businessprocess integration technology components 26 Introducing the WebSphere Portal task portlet capability 27 Example scenario: managing benefits-registration processes 31 Conclusion Introduction To maximize investments in applications and information, successful organizations are implementing enterprise-wide, consistent, security-rich architectures. Business logic and application data typically are scattered throughout organizations across a multitude of software assets. This business logic and data reside in databases, packaged applications, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and back-end systems, such as IBM CICS repositories. They re also found in existing Java and Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) applications. Technology must bridge the gap between IT and business processes to facilitate business responsiveness. It must provide the infrastructure support to adapt and extend key processes to employees, customers and partners. It must accelerate development and deployment. It must integrate seamlessly across platforms and applications. These applications, in turn, must integrate with industry-specific solutions, applications and legacy systems. And, to maximize the value of these resources, users must have unified views of workflow processes to manage and respond to everyday business operations. By effectively integrating business processes, you can gain competitive advantage, increase organizational efficiency and provide timely, controlled responses to customers, suppliers and other internal processing requests. Business integration is about making people more productive in the context of the business they do every day, by exposing more people to your automated business processes. How? By connecting data, applications, processes and people across and even beyond your company. Business integration gives you the ability to leverage existing IT investments while delivering the flexibility you need to adapt quickly to changing business conditions. The potential result? Shortened development life cycles. Lower development and system maintenance costs. And improved coordination across business systems to increase employee, partner and customer satisfaction.

3 Page This white paper describes how IBM WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 user-task-list management capabilities and IBM WebSphere Process Server process choreographer components can help you integrate user-task requirements and enable you to perform your business processes faster. It also explains how WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Process Server components can help you accelerate your company s transformation by improving organizational responsiveness and by providing capabilities to expand and modify process requirements as your business needs change. To improve operational efficiency within the limits of their existing infrastructures, many organizations are using process-driven portals to optimize collaborative business processes across the enterprise. Portals began as a way to provide users with a single, security-rich, personalized access point to content and applications. Many early portals were built on proprietary application servers, and departmental portal deployments were simplified through portal-in-a-box solutions. Today, process-driven portals provide integration, personalization, security features, collaboration and portal workflow services to help users complete everyday tasks as efficiently as possible. A portal combines portlets application logic, user interfaces, collaboration and/or content together into one unified presentation. Portlets are reusable components that combine Web-based content, application functionality and access to resources. Portlets are assembled into portal pages which, in turn, make up a portal implementation. Portlets are also services. And specific services can be created to enable integration, process-driven workflow and collaboration using portal platforms.

4 Page Composite applications are a way to aggregate business services and present them to the right users at the right time. You must understand the user s role to provide the right context within the portal or application and deliver the right content, applications and processes. This approach reduces the burden on the user by hiding the underlying complexity. By consolidating access to the content, applications and processes relevant to the user into one view, you simplify the user s tasks and provide value. This composite view improves productivity and helps increase overall business process efficiency. With WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 task-management and process-integration features, you can extend the value of existing business-process systems by providing access through consistent, easy-to-use and coordinated interfaces. In addition, the workflow builder component, provided as a technical preview in WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 software, extends the capability to create workflows beyond business-process execution language (BPEL) with a wizarddriven, portlet-based interface. Workflow builder extends WebSphere Portal software s business-process integration capabilities by enabling business users to easily organize repetitive collaborative tasks for example, managing approvals required to hire a new employee into a sequenced, standardized workflow process, without programming. And workflow builder extends the portal s ability to present required tasks dynamically across a range of online and mobile devices. With immediate access and interaction with business processes, your organization can adapt quickly and increase overall responsiveness to changing daily business requirements.

5 Page For offline access to key portal applications, IBM Lotus Expeditor software can also be used to create a compelling user experience by optionally aggregating WebSphere Portal applications with other sources of information on desktop, laptop and tablet computers. By combining portlets with other applications in an offline environment, such as Java developed applications, native Eclipse* based applications, Adobe PDF, Microsoft Visual Basic and IBM Workplace Forms applications, Lotus Expeditor software can augment the portal experience with a managed rich client environment. And Lotus Expeditor software can augment the BPEL capabilities of WebSphere Portal software with access to workflow based applications in an offline, rich client user interface. The middleware within Lotus Expeditor software can be used to extend WebSphere Portal applications and business processes so they can be accessed locally, without the need for a network connection. This can improve the user experience and is ideal for situations when the user is mobile or when an Internet connection is expensive, unreliable or simply not available. With immediate access to and interaction with business processes, your organization can adapt quickly and increase overall responsiveness to changing daily business requirements. Meeting everyday business-processing requirements Simply coordinating business processes efficiently across automated systems isn t adequate in current environments to meet everyday business-processing requirements. And it won t allow you to make the most of your organizational assets. To successfully achieve this goal, you need to provide an effective interface that dynamically presents tasks associated with defined business processes to the appropriate people for immediate action. Organizations are also incorporating collaborative services such as document management, forms and workflow

6 Page 6 approvals, and and instant messaging, within the business-process management context, to help improve communication and responsiveness, help build relationships and help foster innovation across your employees, partners and customer audiences. Enabling fast identification of, and connection to, appropriate organizational resources can help you respond quickly to business operations that require interaction. You can use business-process applications that require role-based user interaction to: Extend and externalize enterprise business-process applications such as order processing and tracking, inventory fulfillment and maintenance, and call-center servicing to deliver access to employees, customers and business partners. Provisions for role-based approval or exception processing can help you streamline the entire customer purchasing-and-support life cycle. Increase employee productivity by providing wider access to business-process systems that require event-driven and time-sensitive user-facing task interactions. These interactions can include benefits registration, help desk, travel and vacation requests, team content publishing and request for proposal business-management functions. Transform and optimize existing infrastructures without disturbing existing business processes. Coordinate notification, implementation and completion of user-facing tasks across multiple operating systems and applications, centrally. This capability allows you to serve a variety of employee, partner and customer task-processing requirements, in the context of existing business-process systems.

7 Page Accelerating the evolution to a more flexible, responsive organization More than operational efficiency, today s business environment requires a dynamic infrastructure that allows you to create new business processes and leverage existing processes cost effectively. Such a dynamic infrastructure enables you to uncover hidden value in your company s operations, while speeding your potential return on investment (ROI). Meeting these infrastructure demands can help you focus on your core competencies and differentiate your company from your competition. With an open, scalable architecture, you can simplify your daily maintenance and operations; expand the reach of existing applications to a wider set of users; efficiently direct the right tasks to the right users; coordinate business flows to completion; and reduce users reliance on support staff to manage their interactions with application data. Ultimately, you can increase employee productivity, customer loyalty and the lifetime value of customer and partner relationships. Information Process Dynamically adaptive work environment Simplified end-user experience Security-enhanced, role-based interaction Access anytime, anyplace Vision to monitor a changing business environment Figure 1. The WebSphere Portal platform integrates people, information and business processes.

8 Page To help propel your strategic business initiatives, IBM WebSphere Portal software provides six essential capabilities: Model and simulate business functions and processes from an as-is to a to-be state. Transform key applications, processes and data. Integrate islands of applications, processes, people and information. Interact with resources virtually anytime, anywhere. Manage business processes more effectively by seamlessly, sequentially integrating role-based, user-facing tasks that run within business processes, and view and monitor the results to better help you meet your business objectives. Accelerate integration by leveraging tools and technologies to simulate, model, define and implement business processes. With WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 software, you can use prebuilt task-management portlets, link processes to workflow modeling and take advantage of implementation capabilities, including support for electronic forms-based workflows, to integrate user-facing task requirements with existing business processes. Business integration software from IBM can help you model, transform, integrate, interact, manage and accelerate your business strategies. Specific capabilities include simplified, integrated development tools, a delivery framework that supports dynamic presentation of interfaces to business-process tasks with collaborative services and security-enhanced and stable deployment. Together, these capabilities, combined with IBM s industry-leading expertise in open and industry standards, provide the necessary building blocks of a highly efficient, service-oriented architecture (SOA).

9 Page Building the foundation for a more flexible infrastructure: SOA and Web services Implementing an SOA gives your organization the flexibility to treat business processes and your underlying infrastructure as defined components that you can mix and match to address your specific business needs. An SOA leverages standards-based interfaces to enable applications to communicate as discrete business services, providing a flexible infrastructure that can more easily respond to changing business requirements. It provides a foundation that allows you to quickly combine new and existing applications to address changing business needs and to help improve operational effectiveness. Every application or resource can be represented as a service with a standard interface, enabling each to exchange structured information. Reusing enterprise assets, services and capabilities can help you respond to customer demands faster. And it can help streamline your processes and lower your total cost of ownership (TCO). Web services are distributed systems technologies that provide access to business services. They are a way to describe business functions that can be accessed across systems and platforms over a variety of communication protocols, including HTTP/Secure (HTTPS), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Java Message Service (JMS), Remote Method Invocation/Internet Inter-Orb Protocol (RMI/ IIOP), Java EE Connector Architecture (JCA) Adapters, Java and Microsoft.NET protocols, using Web Service for Remote Portlets (WSRP) and Web Services Description Language (WSDL) interfaces.

10 Page 10 Business services, linked and coordinated across standardized interfaces, operate across an enterprise service bus of loosely or tightly coupled application components. Business logic and application data can now be accessed through internal and external Web services. Instead of starting from the ground up with every new application you build, you can reuse your organization s existing software assets and leverage Web services to develop new, integrated applications. IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory software, included with WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 software, is a toolset for building portlets to enterprise systems without programming and provides additional support for this model by utilizing wizard-like builders to create service providers or consumers. Also included in the WebSphere Portal architecture, IBM WebSphere Process Server software provides the standards-based Java EE and component technologies, such as Web services support, scalable application implementation infrastructure, modeling and application-development tools, data integration and workflow capabilities you need to support and manage SOA solutions. Additionally, WebSphere Portal software enables you to extend your IT infrastructure to other areas of your business, such as backend business process management and information management. WebSphere Portal software also provides capabilities to manage your userpresentation layer for business applications and processes. These capabilities include role-based access to user-facing business-process tasks through portlets and application programming interfaces (APIs), access to business processes, access to coordinating services and access to portlets or Web services created with WebSphere Portlet Factory software. As a result, you can smoothly connect user-experience elements and tasks within the implementation of defined

11 Page 11 business processes, increasing the value you gain from back-end applications. And Web 2.0-related enhancements introduced in WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 software such as improvements to the portal user interface that leverage Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax), as well as context-sensitive menus and flyout palettes of applications improve both the user interface and the performance of your portal. Reusing enterprise assets, services and capabilities can help you respond to customer demands quicker, and at the same time streamline your processes and lower your TCO. WebSphere Process Server software and the WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 architecture offer a new, service-oriented approach to application development called service choreography. With intuitive business-process-based development tools, you can take existing software assets and quickly model and define how these assets can be used in new Java EE applications. The WebSphere Process Server process choreography run-time component manages implementation of defined business-process workflows and transactions. For example, as shown in Figure 2, using process-modeling tools, you can combine customer information from a packaged customer relationship management solution to interact with Java EE components from an existing order-processing application. This enables you to incorporate new business logic that allows rolebased notification of required user-facing tasks to support order review and exception approvals. As a result, you can deliver more-responsive business applications by incorporating role-based user tasks as defined sequences. And increase the value of your existing business processes.

12 Page 12 Start Initialize variables Parse envelope Exception 1. Perform filters 2. Set verb 3. Send object Result list valid Log Result list valid Sync logic 497 Encryption If the exception was included in the collaboration parameter INFORMATIONAL_EXCEPTIONS, then log a trace and end success. If the exception was not an INFORMATIONAL_EXCEPTION, then raise the exception and end failure. End success Send ? True False Informational exception True False Raise exception End failure Send Trace (Level 1) End success Figure 2. Integrated process choreography Java EE workflow capabilities

13 Page 13 Helping to maximize employee productivity, partner relationships, customer loyalty and lifetime value To succeed in a fiercely competitive marketplace, you must innovate. Often, the force driving innovation is the need to speed interactions among people and processes, across organizations, divisions and individuals, whether they re employees, business partners or customers. To respond to these challenges, you have to: Manage your organization s ability to assemble and interchange application processes and collaborative services to quickly adapt to changing business conditions. Enable employees to participate more efficiently with organizational assets through expanded interaction with automated enterprise application processes. Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty by providing greater access to information and status, and by enabling more-responsive servicing. Meet the demands of employees, partners and customers who need access to business information, tasks and work-list statuses through multiple touch points and devices. Organizations are best able to leverage their IT infrastructures and business goals by implementing solutions that address their requirements on a single, scalable platform that can support multiple business models, including businessto-employee, business-to-consumer and business-to-business models. These solutions must also coordinate processes across the enterprise, seamlessly linking how people participate in these processes, according to their roles and tasks, with application-processing functions to drive effective resolution of daily operations.

14 Page 14 A robust portal platform not only enables you to increase business efficiencies and extend the value of current business-process systems, it s the ideal SOA entry point, as portals address SOA from the user s perspective. A robust portal platform can enable a wider set of users to interface with what typically have been closed, automated systems. By facilitating faster, more secure access to information, you can: Empower line-of-business users with more efficient access to people, information and processes, and with the ability to complete role-based tasks. Improve communication with and service to employees, partners and customers. Increase application usage by giving larger groups of users access to the specific parts of applications they require. Expanded usage can reduce the need for help-desk staff to support applications such as human resources (HR) and travel-desk applications. Portals provide the ideal framework for integrating user-facing, task-support requirements with automated, traditionally closed and inaccessible businessprocessing functions. Portals support delivery of a highly secure, unified access point through consistent interfaces to Web applications spanning a range of systems. And they provide valuable functions like search, collaboration and workflow in a security-rich environment as well as new capabilities that enable you to centralize task-list management by integrating it with defined business processes. You can deploy a variety of applications developed independently, often across a range of geographic locations, to the end users who need them.

15 Page 15 When you implement your business-process solution, you can fully and smoothly integrate users as active participants by employing WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 software with its task-list-management portlet interfaces, support for electronic forms-based workflows, and other application development and workflow tools and WebSphere Process Server software with its business-process-management components and integration capabilities, which incorporate collaborative services. Figure 3 shows an example. Employee Manager Travel assistant Enter travel request Approve Process instance Book flight Figure 3. Role-based user interaction with business-process tasks WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 software introduces composite application templates that you can use to store an application definition for subsequent reuse. With this introduction, WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 software extends the ability to design and manage business applications to the level of authorized business users, without requiring programming skills. This further improves an organization s ability to deliver relevant, business-specific applications to the proper audiences, as well as the ability to assemble and deploy such applications more quickly.

16 Page 16 WebSphere Portal software provides features that help business analysts, application managers and application designers assemble and edit applications. The business components that constitute an application can be portal resources or Java EE resources. Templates define the properties, pages, roles and parameters of applications belonging to a particular category and the components that are deployed on each page of an application. From templates, users can create multiple applications that share a common definition. Templates that users create and customize are listed in the application template library. Access to templates is controlled by user roles that are assigned in the template-making process. Applications assembled from templates are listed in the application catalog. Each application includes an information portlet, a membership portlet and one or more components with which users work. Applications can be customized and saved as new templates. Access to applications is controlled by user roles that are assigned within the template-making process. Business users can use the workflow technology, included within the application template feature of WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 software, to extend a composite application with workflow capabilities by defining links between collaborative processes. WebSphere Portal software s workflow capabilities allow business users with domain knowledge to create and run simple, collaborative, rich content oriented workflows. This helps improve responsiveness to business needs by allowing workflow processes to be developed without coding and to be deployed without requiring Java EE administrative skills. Process owners can use WebSphere Portal software s workflow builder features to create and change departmental workflows. Workflow builder provides an intuitive point-and-click interface to define the workflow. This includes defining the various tasks, both manual and automated, the task order and the associated roles.

17 Page 17 WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 software provides three automated tasks, delivered out of the box, that can be used: send mail, call Web service and reference document from the WebSphere Portal document manager. To allow rich content to be associated with workflows, users can manually add related content to a workflow. This related content can be a file from your file system or a document referenced from the WebSphere Portal document manager. Figure 4. Workflow builder component of the IBM WebSphere Portal offering

18 Page 18 The design infrastructure provides support for four out-of-the-box portlets: Workflow list portlet. Allows high-level view of existing workflows (owner, status and due date), creation of new workflows and view of workflow details Task list portlet. Provides composite application workflows along with other tasks for the end user Current task portlet. Provides information on the current task and available actions Related content portlet. Allows file attachments to be added or documents to be referenced from the WebSphere Portal document manager Workflow builder, Lotus Expeditor software and business-process integration: options to enable portal process driven operations WebSphere Portal software s application workflow complements existing businessprocess integration in WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 software, as described earlier in this document. Those applications focus on transactional, bidirectional workflows with interactions (not one way) to back-end systems. Applications built using workflow builder can call to this type of process integration application via APIs. By tying into the composite application programming model, WebSphere Portal software s workflow capability extends the value of an SOA. To help further improve employee productivity, Lotus Expeditor 6.1 software further extends WebSphere Portal workflow and SOA capabilities in two key areas: local portlet support on the client and the aggregation of both portal and nonportal components in a composite application. Lotus Expeditor software enables the development and deployment of managed client applications to various devices. The Lotus Expeditor toolkit enables you to transform Java Specification Request (JSR) 168 portlets into rich client applications running on Microsoft Windows or Linux platforms. These portal applications can then be used offline on a desktop, laptop, kiosk or tablet computer. And with the Lotus Expeditor network client installer, you can use WebSphere Portal software to administer applications on the client.

19 Page 19 Lotus Expeditor software can be used to deploy applications that visually integrate a variety of components in a composite view and that physically integrate the components with the business processes contained in back-office applications. As shown in Figure 5, the software can help integrate components such as WebSphere Portal, text terminal, Eclipse Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) and Microsoft ActiveX components. You can also include Java Swing, Visual Basic, Ajax, PDF, Java Server Pages (JSPs) and Workplace Forms components. IBM Workplace Forms software, which enables design and management of standards-based forms, is an included component of the IBM WebSphere Portal Extend Version 6.0 software release. Lotus Expeditor software also helps enable intercommunication and interoperability between these components. Eclipse SWT Embedded browser ActiveX Host access Native Windows Figure 5. Using Lotus Expeditor software, you can deploy applications that integrate a variety of components within a single composite view for end users.

20 Page 20 The IBM WebSphere Portal platform architecture Whether you re a small or midsize firm or a large, multinational corporation, WebSphere Portal solutions can provide the extensibility and flexibility to help you adapt in today s shifting marketplace environment and with changing business-integration requirements. WebSphere Portal software provides a modular, easily extensible architecture (shown in Figure 6). It forms the basis for an application development and deployment layer, and operates on a platform of standards-based services, including the Java EE application server engine provided by IBM WebSphere Application Server software, which is included with WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 software. With this release, the included WebSphere Process Server process choreographer continues to provide native support for BPEL for Web Services (BPEL4WS) within the WebSphere Process Server process choreographer run-time component. It also provides new capabilities such as those described on the following pages. WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Process Server software provide a comprehensive Java EE and Web services technology-based infrastructure that integrates enterprise data and transactions. These software products provide a rich application-deployment environment, through which you can build, manage and deploy dynamic applications capable of handling high transaction volumes. WebSphere Process Server software provides a basic Web application container and associated services to the WebSphere Portal framework, including authentication, scalability services, enterprise application connectors, and workflow modeling and implementation through its process choreographer component.

21 Page 21 Page aggregation Portlet container and services Java EE Desktop and mobile browsers Authentication Themes and skins JSP tag library Transcoding Translation Portlet API JSR 168 Content access Search Web clipper Document manager JCA Web services JMS JDBC Remote portlet request Authentication Portlet data Collaboration Administration Credential vault EJB Security Servlet Caching XML access Portal database Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) User profile database Portlet proxy Single sign-on Enterprise data applications and Internet content Process choreographer Figure 6. The WebSphere Portal architecture WebSphere Portal software provides other services, including a portlet container, associated API and a collection of services to support the deployed portlets. It includes integrated access to collaborative technologies, such as , instant messaging, document management, team collaboration, Web-content publishing and search services. WebSphere Portal software also supports standards-based integration, including JSR 168 portlet API and WSRP, Version 1.0 to run Web service-enabled applications. WebSphere Portal software, similar to the underlying application server supplied by WebSphere Process Server software, is both an application framework and an operating environment, and includes tools for performance tuning and capacity planning, Web site design and delegated administration, application deployment and 24x7 maintenance procedures.

22 Page 22 Through support for standards-based interfaces and portlet-building tools, WebSphere Portal software offers a range of development options that can enable you to easily extend the framework to respond to customers changing needs. WebSphere Portal software supports: A range of portlet-building options, including tools such as IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory software, which allows you to quickly build composite applications from enterprise back-end systems. The ability to connect to a variety of enterprise systems, including SAP, PeopleSoft, Siebel, IBM Lotus Domino, Java Database Connectivity (JDBC), Oracle, Web services enabled applications and other sources. Full Java technology-based integrated development environment (IDE) tools, such as the Eclipse technology-based IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software tool, which supports the development, debugging and testing of sophisticated enterprise portlet applications. Extension of WebSphere Portal applications to provide a rich client user experience through the Lotus Expeditor toolkit. This provides the ability to extend portlets to the Lotus Expeditor client and integrate other client applications, such as Visual Basic, native and ActiveX applications, into the server-side applications that WebSphere Portal software aggregates. The IBM Workplace and WebSphere Portal catalog is a Web resource hosting over 600 supported portlet applications and solutions, from IBM and IBM Business Partners, that are available for download and use by WebSphere Portal clients.

23 Page 23 WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 software lets you use the business-process implementation capabilities provided in the underlying WebSphere Process Server framework to support new applications that combine role-based user interaction with business-process tasks. Users are provided access to their business-process tasks through new, centralized, task-list notification and management portlets. These portlets provide business-process coordination between application components and users. This solution combines WebSphere Process Server process choreographer and IBM WebSphere Integration Developer workflow management and modeling tools. This combination provides other capabilities to construct and link unified portlet interfaces that manage user-facing task operations and workflows with application business processes. Business-process integration, combined with new WebSphere Portal support for user-task notification and centralized task-list portlet management, delivers a superior application framework to connect and manage the user-facing tasks required to help ensure that business processes run smoothly. New features that support these requirements include presentation of dynamically generated portlet interfaces specific to the role and task requirements of individual users, rendered as required and removed when user tasks are completed. This user-task-list and business-process implementation framework is extensible and can be tailored to match your organization s process workflow. Role-based management requirements can be customized to match the process modeling and requirements. This customization increases end users abilities to interact with business processes and enables you to transform and extend the value of your existing automated processes, manual processes, Web applications and back-end systems.

24 Page 24 As a result, you can create a new class of portal-based composite applications that link access between independent back-end applications through a unified set of portlet interfaces that are customized for the user and that behave as a single application. Lotus Expeditor software enables these applications to integrate with desktop applications in a rich client environment. These composite applications enable you to provide controlled, choreographed access to processes operating across different platforms, applications and enterprises. The portlet interfaces provide the unified layer users interact with, according to their roles, to monitor and manage business-process implementation. Details about business-process integration technology components Business-process integration in the WebSphere Portal platform runs defined business processes via the IBM WebSphere Process Server process choreographer component. The WebSphere Portal portlet task-management interfaces create, in concert with WebSphere Process Server technologies, a presentation layer for business processes. This common layer allows business users to efficiently work on assigned tasks and combines these processes within automated user-facing tasks.

25 Page 25 Flexibly developing, using and administering business processes within WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 software involves multiple tools, as shown in Table 1. Rational Application Developer software WebSphere Integration Developer software WebSphere Portal software and business-process choreographer WebSphere Process Server software Workplace Forms software WebSphere Portlet Factory software Lotus Expeditor network client installer Provides wizards and tools for developing task processing portlets. Provides the BPEL process editor for creating business processes and a WebSphere run-time test environment, so you can test and debug business processes. For more information, visit ibm.com/software/integration/wid/. Provide a run-time environment for testing all of the business-process components. Provides an administrative console to manage business processes. It includes WebSphere Process Server process choreographer BPEL flow manager, which runs standards-based, structured business flows that coordinate across user and system components; outputs the processing logic as BPEL processes; and coordinates and tracks processes as they run. The WebSphere Process Server human task manager component of the process choreographer assigns and coordinates user tasks and roles defined in BPEL flows. And it then tracks task handling among sets of unified portlets that support the integration of user-facing tasks within business-integration workflow sequences. Helps reduce the time, costs and problems inherent to paper-based forms processes. Workplace Forms software unleashes information trapped in paper, making it instantly available to anyone, at any time and anywhere helping speed business transactions and increase responsiveness with intelligent, easy-to-use, dynamic forms that reduce or eliminate errors at the point of entry. Provides developers new to Java coding the ability to rapidly create, deploy, change and maintain Web portlets. Enables WebSphere Portal software to deploy, maintain, update and delete applications deployed to the Lotus Expeditor rich client platform. Table 1. Tools for developing, using and administering business processes within WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 software

26 Page 26 Introducing the WebSphere Portal task portlet capability WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 software includes portlet-based, task-list interfaces to enable WebSphere Portal end users workflow clients to receive notifications and manage end users specific, role-based interactions with workflow and business-process applications. Applications developed using WebSphere Integration Developer software and the WebSphere Process Server process choreographer can be presented as dynamically rendered portlet applications and managed centrally through the task portlet in WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 software. During implementation of business-process workflow sequences, the process choreographer engine, working in conjunction with the human task manager, initializes a portlet with the information required to identify the application and user-facing roles involved with the business process. As the business process runs, initializing different portlets and portal pages, these portlets are refreshed with user, status and application-processing information. As a result, the portal server always immediately displays the appropriate tasks to the appropriate portal users based on their defined roles within the choreographed process. The task-list portlet presents a centralized view of various business processes with which a specific portal user might interact. The WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 my tasks portlet allows users to view and centrally manage, claim and process tasks defined within a business workflow that is coordinated by the process choreographer component. The portal user can perform a task, or initiate a task, that dynamically launches other portlet interfaces according to the user s role and task-processing stage. As the user selects each task, a corresponding page launches, enabling the user to work on that task. The page stays visible

27 Page 27 only for the amount of time required to manage the task. This conserves userinterface space and avoids visual clutter by removing unnecessary portlets and pages once the tasks have been completed. The my tasks portlet application also supports task alerts and notifications. This feature enables a wider set of portal users to actively participate in a timely manner, as required, with defined business processes without needing to understand the configuration and access processes specific to each underlying system. Example scenario: managing benefits-registration processes Most organizations have application processes that require users participation based on how their roles dictate they interact with transactional business processes. These processes often span several applications and locations. Employee registration for health benefits is one example of a self-service process requiring role-based user access and interaction and a well-defined set of business rules and transactional processes to support completion of mandatory tasks within a specific time period. To support this application, the organization in this example scenario uses WebSphere Portal portlet-building tools to construct a set of interfaces that presents appropriate benefit-provider selections. Behind the scenes, the portlet application, by coordinating with the supporting workflow process that is defined using the IBM WebSphere Integration Developer process-modeling toolset, has established a defined sequence of operations and connections between the organization s internal and external systems. This sequence includes the internal ERP HR system that maintains employee data and benefits-registration choices; the organization s system that manages notifications, alerts and selection confirmations; and several external provider benefits-management

28 Page 28 applications, with user interactions and roles defined as integral components of the business flows. After this sequence has been completed, these applications run within the WebSphere Process Server and the WebSphere Portal framework, using the process choreographer and its business-process engine to coordinate how defined steps run and to coordinate business-flow status across business system and user roles. In this scenario, these applications are connected to the same business-process engine and choreographer toolset, so processes can be modeled sequentially and can involve steps and process flows across applications that require information presentation, verification, confirmation, exception approval, transaction rollback and registration confirmations. Through the WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 task-list portlet, an employee receives a new task titled benefits registration enrollment period. Upon opening the task, the employee can view a new portlet window with information defining the enrollment period, current enrollment status and provider information. A begin registration process link is provided to enable the employee to initiate the benefits information-gathering and registration process. Selection of that link presents a new portlet interface with a list of healthcare benefits providers with which the organization has contracted. This list is combined with information maintained in the organization s HR employee data table or its ERP system s employee data table that shows the employee s current benefits program information. The employee then selects from content available in portlet interfaces that dynamically display more information about the available individual provider benefits and the associated costs.

29 Page 29 As the employee moves through the selection process, portlets that present required information, selection choices and confirmations are dynamically displayed only for the period required, enabling the employee to interact with a specific point in the selection process sequence. After the step sequence is completed, the specific portlet is removed from the display and replaced with the next sequence in the process, providing more information, process status and next steps required. Options to receive more information through automated interaction or phone-based support services are available during the benefits-selection period, and process status of registration tasks is marked accordingly. As provider selections are made and finalized, behind the scenes the WebSphere Process Server process choreographer BPEL flow manager coordinates required connections defined using standard SOA protocols. It also evaluates the business rules that govern the data transfers between the external healthcare-provider systems, the organization s internal HR or ERP system and systems required to support the defined sequence and conditions to run the benefits-registration process. When an employee registers with a particular provider, an automated service transmits the registration request to the provider, returns an acknowledgment to the user portlet interface and updates the employee data record in the HR database with confirmed benefits-registration selections made for the new year.

30 Page 30 The employee s registration status is tracked and updated to the system. The system continues to send task alerts only to employees who still need to register for benefits during the specified interval, and the system marks the task status as complete for newly registered users. Users receive official notifications confirming their employee data-registration status and provider-selection information. At the same time, the organization s HR managers receive updated data reports regarding the percentage of employees who have completed registration as the defined workflow processes required for individual employee registration conclude. The capabilities provided in WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 software enable developers to create user-facing portlet applications, launched from the central task-list interface as coordinated by the WebSphere Integration Developer process-modeling tool and as coordinated and implemented by the WebSphere Process Server BPEL workflow engine. The task-list portlet interface, combined with support for dynamic assembly of task-based portlet interfaces, gives end users faster, security-rich and more-efficient access, and portal workflow, across required enterprise processing applications. This enhanced functionality enables organizations, such as the one described in this scenario, to more productively manage the interactions required across people, enterprise applications and business processes.

31 Page 31 Conclusion Business-process integration can significantly increase your business responsiveness, enabling you to react more quickly, correctly and reliably to changing demand. WebSphere Portal software offers the ideal, user-centric entry point to an SOA, with an extensible framework that can help you leverage existing IT assets and achieve business success. Through new features and capabilities introduced with the latest release, WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 software supplies you with more resources than ever to integrate business processes, address increasing pressure, accelerate implementation, extend existing assets and increase ROI. It provides the pathway toward helping people collaborate more effectively and accelerate business processes within your organization, as well as across your customer, partner and supplier systems. WebSphere Portal software s solution architecture supports security-rich, customized user access to applications, data, collaborative services and business processes on a single, unified, scalable platform. And WebSphere Portal software helps meet today s business requirements, while laying a foundation for future growth. For more information To learn more about WebSphere Portal software, visit: ibm.com/websphere/portal

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