I’m really happy to introduce today the preview version of Bonita Open Solution, actually the version 5 of the well known Bonita project in which BonitaSoft is putting all its efforts and dedication last months.
Bonita Open Solution is the open source solution that will change the game in the Business Process Management market with a radically different approach of doing BPM. Bonita Open Solution allows to easily create ready-to-use end user applications based on processes for any kind of organizations and any kind of projects.
With the release of this preview version we want to share with the Bonita users, the community, our partners and the whole BPM industry some of the new features available and also introduce additional features that will be part of the final release of the product.
The Bonita BPM Studio
The first thing you will notice about Bonita Open Solution, is how quickly you can build your process based application with the Eclipse based BPM Studio. The main idea behind the Bonita BPM Studio is to provide an intuitive environment allowing not only to draw processes but also to generate standalone process based web applications.
The Bonita BPM Studio meets the Business Process Management Notation standard (BPMN) challenge with a simple and intuitive graphical interface that hides the complexity of BPMN and address BPM requirements. You can draw processes as naturally as on a whiteboard with the BPMN context palette; you can also add connectors to your information system, define groups and users involved in a process, add relevant data… and then just run your process as an standalone application in a browser.
An intuitive wizard will guide you to the configuration of a connector from a particular process or a particular step in a process. The current version already adds connectors to most of relational databases (Oracle, MySQL, Postgres, Ingres, DB2, Informix…), LDAP repositories, messaging services such email, twitter and standard Java applications. In the final release we will provide many others native connectors to leading enterprise open source solutions such Talend, JasperReports, eXo Platform, Alfresco, OpenBravo…
The nice thing about connectors in Bonita Open Solution is that you can easily develop your own connector (just a Java class) and add it into your Bonita BPM Studio. Your connector will automatically be integrated into the list of available connectors and a graphical configuration wizard will be generated without any additional code. We are about to release some advanced features to easily create your connectors inside the BPM Studio and to share them with others Bonita users… stay tuned!
Our team is also working on advanced features that will enhance the Bonita BPM Studio capabilities such BPM data transformation and data management or XML based standards import/export operations (XPDL, BPEL,…).
Bonita process based applications generation
As soon as you have finished your process definition with the Bonita BPM Studio, you can automatically run it. When you run a process, the BPM Studio will deploy the process into the Bonita Execution Engine, it will generate an standalone application and then it will open a browser pointing to this web application. This is something unique in the BPM market as the final application is in fact a standard java application that can be deployed in any web or JEE server. Each Bonita process based application is a .war file that you can customized in your own way.
Each process based application will be composed by a number of web forms (their number will depend on the manual steps defined in your process and the data you defined on it) and a 100% customizable application template.
We are currently working on a web forms editor that will allow to graphically customize forms included in a Bonita process based application. This web forms editor will be available with the final release of the product and will provide some advanced features to customize your CSS and application templates using your favorite web application framework.
With this approach, project teams can save time when developing web applications based on processes and even have an application up and running in less than one day!
The Bonita User Experience
Well, if you liked the Bonita BPM Studio in this preview, you will love the Bonita User experience. The Bonita User Experience is all about bringing to the end user a web environment that best fits his needs, meaning an intuitive but powerful web interface.
The Bonita User Experience could be compared to traditional BPM portal solutions but with one difference: the web interface was designed to maximize the end user usability. Don’t forget that our main objective with Bonita Open Solution is to democratize BPM in any organization world wide so we decided to build a web application as close as possible to something used by mostly every user, an email interface…
With the Bonita User Experience, users can manage their processes (cases) and steps (tasks) as they would sending an email to a partner, a customer or any other actor in a BPM process. Nice right ?
wait, that’s not all… check out the video covering main features available in Bonita Open Solution preview version! You can also download this version, it certainly worth a try!