Enhancing jBPM Usability?

[ngigiwaithaka]

Hello jBPM Community,

This is my first post here and I am glad to join the jBPM Community.

Now, we started looking at using jBPM to provide BPMN Services to our applications (A1.iO) sometime mid last year. What we found was a really comprehensive BPM engine, at least much better to what we had, but, unfortunately from a User perspective, we found that interacting with the built-in tools for Workflow Management was difficult due to a UI that seemed more designed to be used for developers than actual users.

Fast forward a few months, and we decided to make our own implementation of a modern UI with an inbuilt Form Designer that uses jBPM in its backend but providing a much seamless and enhanced experience.

While this started off as an integral part of our applications, we have gone ahead and separated it from our applications to be its own stand-alone application that can be used by just about anyone using jBPM as a front-end for user interaction.

We would be happy if we got a review and/or critique from the jBPM community.

The link is here https://docs.google.com/a/at.co.ke/document/d/1W3EWAY10-8calbG1XR-_p8EYIfQ7s7JeN-pxy36A2v0/edit#

Regards

Waithaka Ngigi

A1.iO

[salaboy21]

Hi Waithaka,

It looks really nice. It seems to be a generic task list only, am I right?

how is the user supposed to add new workflows to the app? is it possible to create new forms? is it possible to add new users?

I've notice that the task list also includes the concept of document, which for some scenarios make sense, but not for 100% of the situations.

In jBPM6 the main goal was to provide a generic UI but for all the phases of the BPM discipline, and for that reason some of the screens are not as complete as the task list that you are showing there.

It would be nice to see some of the features provided by your application in the community version of the jBPM Console. Have you tried the KIE Workbench? It would be nice to understand which features from your application can be added to the KIE Workbench to make it more user friendly.

Regards

Mauricio

[ngigiwaithaka]

Mauricio,

Thanks for the quick review.

Now to answer your questions, there is an Admin part of this that you can upload already created BPMN 2.0 compliant processes, manage users, build new forms as well as view dashboards. I will post a link to this as well.

The way we are viewing this is mainly for managing tasks that are associated with a business document. This business document e.g requisition could be entered in this application by using the forms built with our form builder or posted from an external application.

I haven't really tried the KIE Workbench, I will at some point and compare it to what we are building. Then I could make a comprehensive review of what could be reused in which application.

Regards

Ngigi

[pzapataf]

Hi Waithaka,

It's really nice, I like the concept of having an rich email-like client to handle tasks, as well as the integration with forms and different types of documents. If this is generic and customizable enough, it can be used to handle a lot of different usage scenarios around BPM (and case management).

Regards

[ngigiwaithaka]

Hi Zapata,

Thanks for your comments.

We intend to make this generic and also build an extensive Application Dictionary, which allows you to build sophisticated forms that you can then attach to a Workflow Process.

We'll have the downloads for this in about a week, I would be glad if you could also review that.

Regards

Waithaka Ngigi

A1.iO

[sgutierr]

Hi Waithaka,

This end user front is powerful to manage tasks and processes besides it's clear and easy. I see in your project good ideas like: attach documents in a task, user and groups management, forms and subforms, etc. I think you're in right way.

One question: Is it possible add expressions related other fields into "Description" field of a task?

Example:  Description: Invoice Number:  {invoiceForm.invoiceNo}   -> where {invoiceForm.invoiceNo} refers to "Invoice No." field 

And you can see:

   Invoice Number: INV/001/004

Regards

[ngigiwaithaka]

Sergio,

Thanks for the feedback.

I like your suggestion on parsing and evaluating expressions. We haven't got around to it but I will discuss this with my engineering team and see how we could use it.

Regards

Waithaka Ngigi

A1.iO