IBM BPM and the Process Federation Server - A Voyage of Discovery #1

So I've spent the past week getting to grips with Process Federation Server (PFS), and I think I'm pretty close now.

In essence, PFS is a capability that's been around for a few years, and allows a business to provide an aggregation layer across multiple different Process Server environments.

Whilst this is often pertinent in the context of a migration or upgrade, perhaps where an older version of BPM is being maintained, to allow existing process instances to drain down, whilst new work is being initiated on a new environment, there's another use case for PFS.

For example, where a business wants to segregate workloads onto different environments, perhaps with a Bronze/Silver/Gold SLA-driven approach, then PFS can provide the "glue" between the three environments, allowing a user to "find their process".

PFS includes an ElasticSearch engine which maintains an index of inflight instances of BPMN ( BPD ) and SCA/BPEL processes.

Here's a picture: -

Source: Getting started with Process Federation Server

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Install this component to create a federated process environment that provides business users with a single point of access to their task list and launch list, regardless of the type of process that they are working on and the IBM BPM back-end system on which the process artifacts are stored.

Consider installing Process Federation Server in the following situations:

• Your process applications are deployed on different IBM BPM deployment environments. Your users must log on to several different instances of Process Portal to get their work done.

• Your users work with both BPD-related and BPEL-related processes and tasks.

• Your IBM BPM environment contains multiple versions of IBM BPM that each runs a different version of the same process application. Your users need to work with the older versions of the process applications while process instances are still running, which means that they need to log on to the Process Portal or Heritage Process Portal application that runs on the associated version of IBM BPM.

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Process Federation Server aggregates both BPD and BPEL-related tasks from all the IBM BPM back-end systems, including systems that run previous versions of IBM BPM that are supported by Process Federation Server. You can take advantage of this support to gradually phase out process applications that are still running on previous versions, while new versions of the process applications run on the latest release of IBM BPM

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So this is the first of many posts about PFS …..