Workflow Futures?
Oracle Workflow appears to have reached an interesting point in its life. Very little appears to be happening; the product itself hasn’t moved on very much in the past few years, and there is a great deal of uncertainty surrounding its future.
In Oracle Applications release 11.5.10 there are hundreds of workflows that are part of the suite; in release 12 that grows to many more. At the moment, it is still unclear as to the future of the Oracle Workflow product as we move towards Fusion, but although there appears to be a movement towards Oracle BPEL, Oracle Workflow is still apparently superior in terms of the human involvement in workflows whereas BPEL’s strength seems to be in integration; the very latest version of BPEL does seem to have improved in human interaction though.
Whether there will be some kind of fusion of BPEL and Workflow, or whether they will remain separate products, or whether BPEL will simply supercede Workflow is unclear, but at the moment there is no upgrade path nor migration path from Workflow to BPEL.
At the present stage, there is the Oracle Workflow Bridge, which allows Oracle BPEL Process Manager to invoke a Workflow process, together with a monitor that reports back to the BPEL process when the workflow has errored or completed. In moving to Fusion, with over hundreds of workflows to migrate currently in release 12 and with the additional problem of existing customer workflows, it seems a huge problem for Oracle to solve.
Business processes, whether developed using Oracle Workflow, Oracle BPEL or both is of particular interest to me, as this area of computing seems to be maturing at a pace and together with SOA look set to become a part of all our futures.
March 5th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
Andy,
The development of Oracle Workflow has been discontinued. Oracle will not be developing new functionality in Oracle Workflow, but they will continue fixing bugs and improving performance. Planned and requested enhancements to Oracle Workflow has been transitioned to the BPEL Process Manager team. In Fusion Applications BPEL will be the new workflow.
It is true that BPEL in itself has no support for human workflow, but it does have good support for asynchronous services. Oracle has developed human workflow services (notifications basically) that can be used in a BPEL process. There is also a movement to extend BPEL to also cover human workflow, BPEL4People, where Oracle say they participate actively.
–
Aleksander Dragnes
March 5th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
Aleksander,
Thanks for the response - I have heard something similar, but it appeared to be hearsay and rumour. Do you have a link to a definitive Oracle document stating it?
Thanks in advance,
Andy
March 5th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
Andy,
Cannot remember where I heard it. It must have been either in a OpenWorld presentation or in an Oracle podcast.
–
Aleksander Dragnes
March 5th, 2007 at 4:03 pm
I’m not entirely sure that “The development of Oracle Workflow has been discontinued” - the thought of trying to migrate the 600+ workflows that exist in the eBusiness Suite to BPEL, while there is no upgrade or migration path from one technology to the other would make this unlikely IMHO.
An upgrade from (for example) 11.5.5 to 11.5.10 is straightforward in terms of Workflow migration - new version do not impact the older versions; new instances use the new definitions. An upgrade from 11.5.10 using workflow to anything using BPEL is massively more complex - what do you do with the processes which are already in progress? I have customers who have processes built into their systems which run for a number of years - all using Oracle Workflow. Without there being a path for migration between technologies, there can be no upgrade path from one version of eBusiness Suite to another.
Matt
March 5th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
One other thing I should mention is that so far, there is no BPEL4PEOPLE. Since IBM/SAP published their white paper nearly two years ago, there has been a lot of silence on the subject. Even places such as the web services journal have nothing on it - apart from asking whether we need it, and that was a year ago!
Even the SAP website on the extension (https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn?rid=/webcontent/uuid/68a31b2b-0a01-0010-18bf-8bfe6c0c1278) hasn’t been updated since June 2006.
I can’t see how you can model business processes without including people - BPEL is very good at integrating with systems (I’ve said it a number of times), since this is what it was always designed to do. Oracle Workflow is very good at integrating with people, since this is what it was always designed to do. I’m sure that Andy will recall that this is exactly the approach I took when training him in Workflow development - what Workflow does well, it does very well, particularly bi-directional communication with people.
My thoughts on on workflow desupport are pretty well documented in a number of places - the OTN forums (e.g. http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=455790), the WorkflowFAQ forum (http://forum.workflowfaq.com) and also in my blog (http://thoughts.workflowfaq.com)
Matt
February 29th, 2008 at 9:01 am
Hi Everyone,
What is the news about position of workflow as compared with BPEL in the future releases of Oacle EBS?
Thanks,
Krishna.