convedo Tech Talk

OpenText MBPM 9.6 comes with a significant amount of new features. Get in touch with our team of OpenText MBPM experts to arrange a demo of the new version OpenText MBPM v9.6 or to discuss upgrade options.

Organizations must deliver a differentiated customer experience and specify what employees, partners and customers want, when and how they want it.

Robotic Process Automation has the potential to streamline many areas of business. The basic idea is that your business employs a host of virtual robots to take over some of the most boring and repetitive manual tasks. Data entry, auditing, and scheduling are just a few of processes that may be ripe for automation, depending on the software already used to manage these items.

Your vision for business improvements delivered

The Metastorm BPM platform delivers the insight, power and agility you need to make your vision for business improvement a reality. To respond to increasing competitive pressures, regulatory changes, market conditions, and customer demands, companies today are looking for ways to not only increase their effectiveness and efficiency but to also become more capable of change than they are today. Gaining, and then maintaining, competitive advantage requires an ability to continue to adapt more quickly and increase operational efficiency — in step with the increasing pace of change. Achieve results quickly by providing a more agile, intelligent business process layer that integrates the underlying legacy systems, provides visibility across critical business processes, and gives you the ability to design processes that deliver competitive differentiation, without the constraints imposed by legacy systems.

Metastorm BPM is a platform for Business Process Management (BPM) systems that automates labor-intensive administrative and management processes. It is a versatile production-strength BPM system that can support a large number of processes, users, and transactions.

It can access data from any ODBC data source, use external forms, integrate with a variety of document management systems via API, and exchange email with most email clients. More importantly, it can easily integrate all of these systems through a single user interface, which it then presents to the user in the two most popular Windows clients, Internet Explorer and MS Outlook.

Robotic process automation (RPA) is one of the most popular trends in digital transformation these days — and for good reason. Like its cousin IT automation, RPA refers to the use of automation to support or replace manual business processes. However, Robotic process automation has the added benefit of using artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to make smarter decisions in the face of unexpected conditions.

The latest release of Appian, the Digital Transformation Platform (TM), accelerates your digital transformation efforts. Appian build 17.3 provides new features that improve the Appian user, designer, and administrator experiences.

This blog post provides an overview of the new features and fixed bugs of OpenText MBPM 9.5.

OpenText’s MBPM (formerly Metastorm BPM) delivers the insight, power and agility you need to make your vision for business improvement a reality. To respond to increasing competitive pressures, regulatory changes, and customer demands, companies today are looking for ways to not only increase their effectiveness and efficiency but to also become more capable of change than they are today.

With Business Process Analysis, your business can achieve results quickly by:

1. Interfacing with a more agile, intelligent business process platform that integrates the underlying applications and information
2. Providing improved business insight across process execution
3. Designing processes rapidly that deliver competitive differentiation, without the constraints imposed by legacy systems
4. Taking advantage of personalized user experiences that offer the latest social, mobile, and cloud based technologies

OpenText MBPM 9.4.2 addresses stability issues and provides support for new environments. See the Supported environments section for more details.

Enhanced SendEmail functionality

When using the OpenText MBPM SendEmail function, you can now specify a delimiter registry setting on the engine machine. Follow these instructions to make the changes manually:

Locate the relevant registry key and add the string key FileDelimiter in the registry location:

64 bit OS:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Metastorm\ework\Engine\SMTP

32 bit OS:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Metastorm\e-work\Engine\SMTP

Notes:

If the FileDelimiter registry key does not exist, the default behavior will be applied, that is the file will be delimited with "," or ";".

The recommended FileDelimiter value is “|” because Windows does not allow the default value as the file name.

Conceptual-level Workflow Models

Conceptual-level Workflow Models typically provide an end-to-end view of an entire Business Process unless the Business Process is so complex that it requires more than one conceptual level. The purpose of a conceptual-level Workflow Model is to organize and link together the more detailed models that are based on their Activity Usages.

WS AppServer Package

The WS-AppServer package introduces another level of metadata abstraction based on the metadata document generated on a relational database. Refer to the topic Java for more details on generating a metadata document of a relational database. Through the WS-AppServer package you can define more constraints and other static methods in addition to the standard basic methods that are automatically generated.

JAVA

Relational database

When connecting to a relational database, you can generate basic CRUD services with the tables defined in the database. This requires the generation of a metadata document first, representing the structure of the database contents. 

INBOX

An integral part of the OpenText Process Suite platform is the inbox application that can be accessed by means of the My Inbox artifact included in the My Applications App palette. The inbox is the default mail box that is used to receive or forward any of the tasks and/or notifications originating from a business process model or case model (only tasks).

GUID

Globally Unique Identifier

In the OpenText Process Suite, this is a hexadecimal string consisting of 32 positions, e.g. 000c2990-6953-11e5-e141-1f639364d29b.

Every object or component, process and / or case instances is assigned a GUID to uniquely identify that object or instance of the object. With the process, this is called a Process Instance ID (PID).

File System

OTPS platform instance at file system

When installing the OTPS platform baseline (step 2 in the previous blog), the appropriate folder structure is created at the file system of the server, starting from the level you specified as the folder where to install the OTPS baseline. Refer to the above mentioned folder locations with Windows and Linux.

File System

When you are installing the OpenText Process Suite (OTPS) platform, you are guided through in a number of steps:

DTAP  

Development, Test, Acceptance and Production. This defines a phased approach to software development and testing. You can refer to the previous blog on Collaborative Workspace for more details.

Collaborative Workspace

Whenever you are developing components with the OTPS platform, you need to build and publish them first to the run-time environment of the OTPS platform in order to be able to test run them.

Case Model

One of the most important differences between a business process model versus a case model is flexibility. A case model or case management process offers flexibility in the execution of the steps or the activities to reach to an acceptable resolution of the case.

Business Process Model

A business process model is a structured and measured set of activities designed to produce a specific output for a particular customer or market. It implies a strong emphasis on how work is done within an organisation. In contrast to a product focus’s emphasis, a process is thus a specific ordering of work activities across time and space, with a clear beginning and an end, as well as clearly defined inputs and outputs.

When you design and implement your business process model with the OpenText Process Suite platform (f.k.a. Cordys Business Operations Platform), you can manipulate the process data stored in XML in the so-called message map. 

While you are implementing a process, you will use the message map to work with the data of the process. 

Customers are placing orders in your shop, but within a limited amount of time they have the right to cancel the order for whatever reason.

This 4 part blog series will provide you more details on the different ways of implementing communication between processes using the two events Send Message and Receive Message that can be part of the process flow.

OpenText MBPM Shortcuts are mini solutions or techniques to solve “How To” questions that have been raised about MBPM.

A few years back, they have been made available by Metastorm but then disappeared.

Now, we have found them again and make them available to you, and we hope you find them useful.

Sometimes we get questions from our customers to very fundamental functionality in OpenText MBPM. One of them was regarding the Alert Message which is visble to users in the ToDo- and Watchlist when using Loopback actions. When using a Loopback action, by default the action updates the Alert Message with the action name of the Loopback action itself. This might not be the expected result. In some cases, the prefered result is to show the previous message, the one which was responsible for the folder ending up at a specific stage. The following quick tip is based on a short cut solution which has been made available by Metastorm many years ago.

• Automatic refresh alerts option in the Web Client
• Custom List enhancements
• MBPM Mobile enhancements
• Custom List column width enhancements
• Support for exporting grid column captions

Most big software vendors are continuously improving their software and adding new features to make their customers happy. Therefore it doesn't comes with surprise that older version of the software are not supported by their support helpdesks.

Although companies try their best to continue supporting old versions many years after they have been superseded by newer versions. But at some point every version need to come to an "End-Of-Life".

Sometimes we get questions from our customers to very fundamental functionality in OpenText MBPM. One of the questions we received recently was around the topic Dynamic Roles and today I post this as a Quick Tip for Metastorm.

There are requirments to to display PDF documents (e.g. Invoices, Purchase Orders, Incoming Letters) on a OpenText MBPM (formerly Metastorm BPM) form. There are different ways to implement this: using a PDF viewer component like Brava Viewer or TiffServer, the iFrame or the HTML <object> tag method.

We still have room in our next OpenText MBPM Foundation class. It runs April 28 - May 2 @ the OpenText office (Reading, UK).

Metastorm Version 9.x delivers many new capabilities that will bring benefits to your organization over and above those delivered by previous versions. Once your developers have adjusted to the new version, their productivity will improve. This blog post discusses why you should consider migrating to Version 9.x.

BPMN event subprocess

Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a graphical notation that describes the logic of steps in a business process. This notation has been especially designed to coordinate the sequence of processes and messages that flow between participants in different activities.

Most BPM tools (e.g. OpenText Cordys, bizagi) these days support BPMN and having a resource that quickly and clearly explains all of the basic terms and applications is critically important.

I hope that you will pass this blog post along to others in your organisation and maybe even print it out to have on hand when others have questions related to BPMN 2.0.

Think you know everything there is to know about OpenText MBPM? Prove it with this quiz and let us know on Twitter @convedo how you did.

Key Concepts and Architecture

1. What is the visual representation of structured activities that are broken down into stage(s) and action(s)?
2. What is the connection point for the Metastorm BPM Designer to deploy BPM processes into the Metastorm Database?
3. What is the name of the list of forms which initiate a listed process?

Recently one of our Opentext MBPM customers asked us how to produce a PDF document from data entered into a Rich Text control. We have implemented this functionality into other Metastorm processes in the past and today I thought it would be a good time to share with you a little snippet to get you started.

First things first – make sure that there is both a mandate, and funding, for the work you are doing. If you require the support from within your company to get started with BPM, you should concentrate on building a business case for your BPM initiative first.

Even when the process is being automated without major changes to the way work flows through the company, the users themselves will experience a disruption. BPM always represents a new way of doing things. Therefore, both business managers and end users need to recognize the problems with the existing process and have a desire to fix them.

Whether you have just started with your migration to OpenText MBPM v9, or think about starting, there are many things to consider. Take a look at our handy infographic showing the advantages, and the pitfalls, of taking this major step forward in your Business Process Management strategy.

For businesses considering a migration to OpenText MBPM v9, there is a helpful whitepaper available that provides detailed insights into the migration process. The whitepaper outlines the key considerations for a successful migration, including the potential challenges that may arise during the process and the best practices for mitigating them.

Once you're ready, here is one more detailed whitepaper about migrating to OpenText MBPM v9 and a Metastorm BPM v7 process review tool to estimate the efforts for your whole migration.

Oh, and of course, don’t forget to read through the 5 fundamental Metastorm BPM migration project tips.

OpenText’s software product, Metastorm BPM, provides a platform on which BPM solutions can be quickly and easily deployed and customized to meet the unique and complex process needs of any organization.

As an enterprise BPM platform, the metastorm worklfow platform offering includes five essential elements – powerful process designer tools, runtime execution engine, integration functions, powerful agility facilities, monitoring and management functions, and process analytics. The Metastorm Designer is the best in its class, and offers a powerful graphical environment in which business users are able to model and design processes, create forms, and develop process actions. To facilitate visibility and continuous process control, Metastorm BPM’s reporting and analytics capabilities are flexible and can be adjusted in real-time to meet immediate information needs. Metastorm’s BPM software offering is unmatched in its ability to rapidly implement complex, human-intense processes and support rapid changes to dynamic processes and roles – delivering the fastest ROI and lowest total cost of ownership for partners and customers.