What's New in Oracle BPM 10.3 Studio

This topic provides an overview of the main new features, improvements and changes in this release of Oracle BPM Studio.

Standards Support


  • By default, new processes now use horizontal swim-lanes. You can change the swim-lanes orientation individually for each process. You can define the default orientation for each project and for your Studio installation.
  • BPM Studio now embraces the BPMN modeling elements and rendering constructs, and BPMN is the new default process diagram theme. Automatic activities and groups now support Loop conditions.
    The new flow elements are categorized into Activities, Gateways, Events, Global Activities, Flow, Lanes and Artifacts. The name of some flow elements changed on this version.
    Activities
    • Interactive
    • Decision
    • Automatic
    • Group
    • Subflow
    • Process Creation
    • Termination Wait
    • Grab
    		 Gateways
    • Conditional
    • Split
    • OR Split (new)
    • Multiple (old name: Split-N)
    Events
    • Message Wait (old name: Notification Wait)
    • Send Message (old name: Process Notification)
    • Timer (new)
    • Compensate
    		 Global Activities
    • Global Creation
    • Global Automatic
    • Global Interactive (old name: Global)
    Flow
    • Connector
    • Transition
    		 Artifacts
    • Measurement Mark
    • Note
    Lanes
    • Lane (old name: Role)
  • Studio is now built on top Eclipse 3.3. AquaLogic BPM 6.0 release was based on Eclipse 3.2.

WorkSpace


  • WorkSpace provides a new edit mode which allows users to change the configuration and layout of panels.
  • Users of BPM WorkSpace can configure and save the layout of panels. A new tabbed interface allows you to define multiple pages, each with its own set of panels. You can export the layout configuration to an XML file and re-import it on a different environment or as a different user. Administrators can define layouts for all users in a certain Role.
  • You can export the data in the Worklist panel to PDF (Portable Document Format) or CSV (Comma-Separated values).
  • You can see a chart representation of the distribution of items in the Worklist panel.
  • WorkSpace includes the following new panels:
    • Task Panel: Renders the execution of interactive tasks within the panel, instead of using the default modal dialogs.
    • Dashboard Display Panel: Provides a way to display Dashboards within a Panel.
    • View Chart Panel: Provides predefined graphical reports about process performance, work items distributions and workload.
    • Application Panel: This panel contains an application (the execution of a Global Interactive). Applications can respond to work item selections or run independently.
  • The user can now do re-assignment operations on multiple instances at once.
  • The Business Rules editor shows additional auditing information, including who and when a rule was modified.
  • WorkSpace now (optionally) stores session-specific information as client-side cookies. This allows load-balancing on a cluster environment without affecting the user experience.
  • This new version of WorkSpace provides a simplified and streamlined interface, focused on usability and ease of use.

General


  • Studio now supports Mac/OS 10.4 Tiger and Mac/OS 10.5 Leopard.
  • Studio now supports Windows Vista.
  • Studio now supports CVS and Subversion version control systems (VCS). Additional systems may work after installing their respective Eclipse VCS plugins but only CVS and Subversion are currently certified.
  • The Studio UI incorporates Eclipse 3.3 improvements such as the following:
    • New Minimize/Maximize behavior: When minimizing view stacks in Studio, the view icons are placed on the nearest trim area. If a view is maximized, all other views are minimized, rather than hidden.
    • Tabs have a new color scheme based on your system title background color, and unselected tabs now also have rounded corners to match the appearance of selected tabs. When tabs become crowded, they now maintain their icon and no longer show an ellipsis in order to maximize the amount of useful information.
    • Firefox can now be set as the internal Web browser.

    For more information on Eclipse 3.3 improvements, see What's New in 3.3.

Process Design


  • Interactive tasks provide a new "previewable" property. The new Application Display Panel and Task Execution Panel of WorkSpace automatically start the execution of previewable tasks without locking the process instance. Enabled by default for Dashboards.
  • New type of Activity: Time Activity. A process instance that arrives to this activity just sits idle until a timed event occurs.
  • Option Process Notification Immediately on Termination Wait activities has been deprecated. Now both the Wait activity and the first activity in the interruption flow always execute in the same transaction.
  • New auto-layout feature re-arranges all visual elements of a process diagram automatically, minimizing superpositions and aligning the flow as much as possible. Only available for processes with horizontal lane orientation.
  • New process property (Greedy Execution Mode) indicates the Process Execution Engine to collapse contiguous automatic tasks in a single transaction. This mode of execution provides better performance for some processes. Disabled by default.
  • A new Process-Level debugger allows developers to introduce breakpoints and debug complete processes running in Studio. When the execution reaches a breakpoint, the Engine pauses and Studio's debugging view appears. You can inspect variables, add new breakpoints, resume and continue execution.

User Interface


  • The Business Analyst and Business Architect profiles provide a simpler set of menu options and toolbars.
  • New editor for BPM Object Presentations. It's easier to use, provides a true WYSIWYG interface (HTML-based), improved CSS support and a new Drag&Drop toolbar.
  • You can now interrupt a running Simulation started with the Run to the End button.
  • New BETWEEN operator added to Business Rules editor (on both Studio and WorkSpace). This operator works with Time and numeric types.
  • The Documentation View now displays read-only documentation for the standard Fuego.* components.
  • New on-line help book Oracle BPM Components Reference provides reference documentation for the standard Fuego.* components. Only available for the developer profile.
  • This version introduces Project Dependency, which allows you to re-use components and role definitions from a common base project.

Integration


  • Oracle BPM now provides an extension to the Microsoft Office 2007 Ribbon. This extension allows users to submit documents to BPM processes right from the Office application.
  • Added support for abstract types when cataloging XML Schemas.
  • New timeout property added to external resources of type HTTP Server. Use this setting to control timeouts on web service invocations.
  • Authentication information added to external resources of type JMS (Java Messaging System)
  • Processes exposed as Web Services can now provide a runProcess operation, which synchronously executes the complete process (from begin to end). Only meaningful on fully automated processes.
  • New component Fuego.Social.ALIActivityStreamPublisher provides operations to publish plain text messages to Oracle WebCenter Interaction (formerly AquaLogic Interaction) activity streams.
Parent topic: Getting Started