The company I currently work for has recently decided to pursue use of TIBCO for some of its BPM needs…   as per usual the decision was made by upper management with little or no IT involvement…  of course the sales pitch made it sound good..  will it fit the needs of our business? who knows…. but I guess time will tell!

Here are some highlights and comments about the TIBCO IProcess training course I attended this week: 

  • Business Studio will eventually replace the Modeler tool.  It currently does not support some things such as duration but the intent is to deprecate modeler and have studio be the defacto place to perform process modelling.  The different support levels and non-interaction between some of the TIBCO products force you to really consider which products your shop should be using.
    • Modeler does not support pools, only swimlanes… you can put swimlanes within swimlanes to “fake” it out.

    • Business Studio does not support durations

  • Try not start deamons manually.  There is a specific order they must be started and stopped.  A startup.bat/shutdown.bat type script is more useful.

  • Internationalization might not be supported for email generation (great :( )… not sure if this product is really geared toward an internationalized site, especially for support of a public internet presence.  Strength initially seems to be to support internal admin processes (in English).

  • When a user starts to work on a procedure it locks it.. there is no way to unlock it from the interface.  Only way to free it up is to go to your DB and fix the tables.   Purge the appropriate rows from _PM_OBJECTS_LOCK && _PROCEDURE_LOCK.  Be careful when doing this though because if someone else starts working on the procedure after you do this then your changes might get clobbered. Another great feature!

  • When building a procedure once you name a step you CANNOT change that name. Names are 8 chars or less… use a better description to aid in readability.  As a workaround, you could manually edit the XPDL to change the step name if required… then just reload the file and re-save.

  • Refer to “Expressions and Functions” document for special keywords/function names that can be used in procedure design. EG. sw_anything added to a selection list will allow the user to key in their own value instead of using the predefined options.

  • Filtering the work queue is very limiting.  Can only define 4 custom filters (which are parameters).  Not sure how we will be able to support all of our current filtering requirements.

  • Some useful auditing messages stored in: AUDITUSR.MES (This is a template file for the auding messages.  You can define custom audit messages within this file).

  • Doesn’t seem to be any way to enforce data masks in forms… maybe a way to do this in general interface using javascript but am not sure.

Terminology:

  1. Releasing a work item moves the case from step – step.

  2. Releasing a procedure moves it from dev to prod.  But keep in mind there might be a QA environment that is still seperate from the real PROD enviroment (both having 2 iprocess servers, one for dev and one for prod).

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