Using ActiveVOS
ActiveVOS is the first all-in-one system that permits companies, business analysts and developers to orchestrate services and automate business processes by:
- Delivering everything needed to create services-based applications. From modeling to orchestration to deployment to reporting, ActiveVOS offers best-in-class capabilities
- Being rigorously standards-compliant, freeing companies and developers from expensive and proprietary systems
ActiveVOS delivers everything you need -- and nothing you don't -- to make 100% standards-based service orchestrations and business process management, or BPM, a reality.
Selected ActiveVOS features are highlighted in the table below. Use the "topics on this page" box to quickly switch to a section in the table.
Document - Graphically and collaboratively create business processes
| Feature | Benefits |
 Design business processes in graphical BPMN designer |
Standard Business Process Modeling Notation eliminates proprietary file formats Create key performance indicators( KPIs) |
| Import existing process documentation from Microsoft® Visio®, UML2, XPDL and BPEL |
Reuse existing process documentation and make them executable |
| Transform BPMN to BPEL and BPEL to BPMN |
Promote collaboration among developers, business analysts and end users Ensure desired process is implemented Document existing processes Liberate processes from proprietary systems |
| Graphically simulate business processes |
Incorporate metadata from running processes to estimate resource requirements and impacts Understand business impact before process is implemented |
Develop – Visually orchestrate human activities and services
| Feature | Benefits |
| Create orchestrations graphically | Simple, code-free and error-free service orchestration of people, processes and services |
| Standards-based orchestration BPEL and BPEL Extensions for People (BPEL4People) support | BPEL is the standard language for creating services-based applications Include human tasks in any process workflow |
| Integrated Complex Event Processing (CEP) |
No need to use an external service to access CEP CEP is a deployment-time attribute of orchestrations, so processes do not have to be altered to utilize CEP BPEL engine emits events useful for CEP applications |
| Reuse existing Java applications |
Plain old Java objects (POJOs) can be exposed as web-services, enhancing reuse and accelerating application development |
| Service discovery:
Built-in means to discover enterprise services |
Reuse enterprise assets |
| Manage and use external service references:
Manages interface and schema references to compare and updates from partners |
Helps manage and control the impact of change |
| Project Asset Management: Cataloging of WSDL and schema assets and tracking of dependencies |
Eases the management of a complex set of related assets and reduces errors |
| Project and Process Templates |
Well-documented samples and complete applications that can be used to start a project or can be used in an existing project |
| Service interface generation from data representation: Generates service interface from data represented by XML data sample and XML schema |
Help quickly integrate non-Web services |
| Customized palette and BPELets creation | Create BPELets to re-use a grouping of activities from other processes Significantly shorten design time by reusing common components and patterns allowing team to access reusable components |
| Tasked-based tabbed property sheets: Declarative tabbed property sheets that assists developers through common tasks |
Eases development tasks |
| Custom functions extensibility: Ability to create custom functions implemented as a collection available for use during design, analysis and at runtime execution |
Extend ActiveVOS easily Reuse existing systems |
| Built-in alert, identity, task, JMS and email services |
Simplifies integration of people and services |
| Customizable task inbox: BPEL Extension for People and WS- Human Task customizable implementation. |
Customize task and notification detail presentation as needed |
| Simulate end-to-end process execution using sample data | Improves test coverage and quality |
| Integrated debugging: Local and remote debugging of a process running on a server. Set breakpoints, step through or run the process. Set default values and track process state Identical techniques used in production to fix a problem with the ability to suspend, resume and terminate processes. |
Faster project delivery with improved responsiveness to problem resolution in production Better collaboration among developers and IT operations staff Visual problem determination |
Test – Create quality applications easily
| Feature | Benefits |
| Integrated development and testing environment: Developers and QA teams use a common designer environment and framework, reducing unit and integration testing effort |
Faster project delivery, improves quality and reduces risks of problems in production |
| Scenario and regression test generation through recorded simulations: Recording and replay of end-to-end process execution simulation with the ability to save the simulation as a “BUnit” test case |
Simplifies repeated testing of complex services-based applications Reduces manual test-case creation |
| Unit and scenario testing - “BUnit” testing: Run BUnit test cases and suites directly from the Designer. Integrated with local and remote debugging. Supports off-line unit testing |
Improved agility and ability to adapt to change through regression testing |
| Data-driven testing and management: Create sample test data to test paths in the process. ActiveVOS Designer automatically generates sample data for complex types. During simulation and unit testing, validate various paths using different data |
High developer productivity in retesting after a change has been made |
Deploy – Push-button deployment
| Feature | Benefits |
| Wizard-based deployment and packaging: Deployment wizards guide you to provide endpoint references and policy assertions for services used in your process |
Ease of use and speeds up deployment |
| Automated deployment: Process can be automatically and remotely deployed to a target server either from ActiveVOS Designer or via an ANT script |
Ease of deployment to and across multiple environments |
| Deployment management: Universal console permits uploading of the deployment package or use of a Web service for accepting the deployment package. Direct administrative API call can be used for custom deployment |
Web Service and Java APIs allow quick and easy integration in existing configuration management infrastructure |
| Policy-based configuration: Supports a rich set of enterprise configuration options through WS-Policy assertions. Support for WS-Security – Authentication, Encryption & Signature; SAML 1.1; WS-Reliable Exchange – guaranteed message delivery; and retry quality of service policy |
Rich runtime configuration capabilities allow runtime behavior to be configured and not coded |
| Built-in integration and connectivity: Binding support for SOAP/HTTP, JMS and REST |
Code-free integration without the requiring an ESB |
| Custom invoker handler framework for EJB and JAVA class invocation | Developers are not locked in to strictly using services and can implement orchestration using a broad set of pre-existing components |
| Endpoint management: URN mapping – Dynamically assign endpoint address on server |
Reduced deployment time and ability to quickly adapt to a reconfiguration (e.g. migration from development to test/QA and to production server) |
| Advanced endpoint location services: Partner addressing schemes to support a myriad of use cases:
|
Late endpoint resolution permits dynamic assignment of the address. Increased ability to adapt to changing conditions e.g. add new partners |
Operate – Enterprise reliability and scalability
| Feature | Benefits | |
|
Monitor and control the production system from anywhere Enhance collaboration for problem determination | |
| Root-cause analysis |
Visually "step back in time" for any running or faulted process, inspect its variables and determine what happened for problem determination or to understand what transpired | |
| Consistent operational views: Consistent rendering from design to runtime, enabling ease of design and maintenance throughout the process lifecycle |
Significantly reduces operational troubleshooting efforts. Reduces administration complexity | |
| Troubleshooting and process execution visibility: Manual operational control to visually review and remediate process or service errors Operators can suspend execution, examine the contents of in-flight messages, and visually troubleshoot problems |
Graceful handling of exceptions avoiding unnecessary and costly remediation | |
| Process exception management: suspend, remote debugging Allows the process to be suspended at the faulting activity rather than be terminated abnormally as well as providing alerts of their occurrences This capability can be made available to all processes or specific processes allow an organization to decide how to handle exceptions. Once caught and suspended the problem can be remedied via the Administration Console or remote debugging. |
Graceful handling of avoidable failure Manual and programmatic operational control provide to review and remediate critical process errors without forcing process termination |
|
| Integrated with debugging facilities: Allows a problem in production to be debugged using breakpoints and stepping through the process. |
Improves the ability to react to problems in production | |
| Server-based process correlation: Use of server-side correlation eliminates the need to developers to handle message correlation |
Ease of development | |
| Process persistence management: All process, state and variable (message) data can be stored to database to permit:
|
Guaranteed process reliability in server outage situation
Improved performance and throughput |
|
| Retry Policy: The retry quality of service policy directs the server runtime to deal with outages and unavailability of a service |
Protects against needlessly
terminating a crucial long running process or human tasks. “Self-healing” dealing with temporary service outages |
Understand - Business Intelligence and Business Activity Monitoring
| Feature | Benefits |
|
Built-in reports and dashboard deliver proactive alerts and notification of process status Analyze usage trends over time RSS and Atom support enable delivery to any device or service |
| Customizable Reporting |
Delivers usage and process information as required to enhance the business Customized reports cans be added to universal console for easy access Export reports to common formats, including Microsoft® Office® and PDF |
Change - Advanced Process Versioning
| Feature | Benefits |
| Process Versioning: Permits deployment of multiple versions of the same process without needing to bring down server to make process upgrade, maintenance and fixes |
Agile change management; near real-time fixes possible |
| Advanced and "where-used" searching: Advanced find capabilities allows for comprehensive searching to locate namespaces, messages and other elements |
Easily re-factor projects |
| Online deployment of new process versions: Hot-deploy changes and selectively chose when to apply an update either in the future or in-flight. Run versions side-by-side, terminate running processes to force a change or allow pre-existing processes run to completion |
Non-stop operation Deploy processes with the confidence that future changes will not disrupt existing operations |
| Process monitoring: Operational control by humans as well as programmatically allows suspend and/or retry of processes |
Business applications are monitored and managed
Manual override possible in exception management and process error recovery |
ActiveVOS Runtime
| Capability | Description |
| ActiveVOS advanced features | Native support for J2EE: BEA WebLogic
Server®, IBM® WebSphere® Application Server, JBoss® Application
Server as well as Apache Tomcat Enterprise performance, scale and reliability needed for mission-critical deployments through clustering Brings SOA process management and workflow to your enterprise deployments Processes are managed within your existing server and middleware infrastructure |
| Scalability | Achieve enterprise performance and scale needed for mission-critical deployments through clustering Automatic scaling and load balancing under management of J2EE infrastructure |
| High Availability | Achieve enterprise reliability to fail-over and clustering |
| Manageability | WSDM-MUWS support |
| Monitoring | Server monitoring (system metrics)
Managed events/notifications |
| Administrative APIs | API access to:
|
| Rich SAML 1.1 support |
|
| Comprehensive JMS Support |
|
Built on Standards
| Application | Standards |
| Interface/Definition | WSDL, XML Schema |
| Protocols | SOAP over HTTP/HTTPS, SOAP/Plain XML over JMS, REST, JAVA/EJB Invocation, WS-Reliable Messaging |
| Orchestration | BPEL 1.1/2.0, BPEL Extension for People, WS-Human Task |
| Modeling | BPMN |
| Security/Identification/ Authentication | WS-Security, SAML, LDAP |
| Governance | WS-Policy |
| Expression Languages | XPath, XQuery, XSLT and JavaScript |
| Attachments | SOAP with Attachments |
