BPM Studio enables business and technical users to collaborate in the discovery, documentation and improvement of business processes as well as the design and implementation of enterprise process applications. It provides a comprehensive and easy-to-use authoring environment for process applications deployed on the Billfish Business Process Manager platform.
BPMN (Business Process Management Notation) is a standardized graphical notation for drawing business process models. It bridges the communication gap between stakeholders who understand business requirements and the technical staff who implement and support automated process solutions.
BPM Studio is based on the BPMN modeling notation standard and allows business users to easily create high-level workflow diagrams. Technical users employ BPM Studio to provide implementation and integration details that allow the high-level diagram to become an executable business process application.
BPM Studio was designed to radically shorten the time between initial design and the deployment of BPM applications. The result is a powerful and intuitive BPM authoring environment that facilitates the creation and implementation of process solutions in just minutes! Below are some of the productivity-enhancing features of BPM Studio:
- Drag-and-drop form task creation - just drag process data onto a user task in the diagram to create an automatic form.
- Graphical expression editor for specifiying business rules and workflow logic.
- Persistent BPM Server connections for rapid and seamless edit-deploy-test development cycles.
- Work online - or - work offline at 30,000 feet!
- Intuitive and self-explanatory object editors and property sheets.
- Connection Assistant feature for easy sequence flow creation.
- Gateway fragment paste facility for easy creation of gateways with numerous gates and target flow objects.
- JavaScript templates for easy database, email and file management integration.
BPM Studio includes an integrated WYSIWYG graphical form designer that you can use to easily create rich single-page or multi-page user forms with all the control types you might expect like listboxes, comboboxes, multi-column tables, radio button groups, date pickers, and many more. You can double-click on a form control to bind it to process data - or better yet - just drag process data onto a form and watch BPM Studio automatically assign the most appropriate form control type and automatically bind it!
The real productivity power of BPM Studio; however, lies in its ability to create Auto-Forms. Auto-Forms are generated by BPM Studio based on a list of process data items assigned to a user task. Process Data items are presented on the form at runtime in the order that they are specified in the BPM Studio Auto-Form specification.
Since BPM Studio allows you to assign both an Auto-Form and a manually designed form to a single user task - and to have the Auto-Form override the manual form at deployment time - this allows you to quickly create process solutions using Auto-Forms while the more time-intensive manual form design process continues. When the manually designed form is complete, just substitute the manual form for the Auto-Form and re-deploy the process. The Auto-Form feature can literally shave days and weeks off of the time required to deploy a new process application!
One of the most powerful features of Billfish BPM is Data Spaces - containers for process data stored in the Billfish BPM Server repository. Data Spaces are independent of any process model and are designed to be shared by multiple business processes. BPM Studio provides data modeling and migration tools to manage server-based data spaces, create data entities, migrate data entities between data spaces and to facilitiate the usage of data spaces by process models. Modeling data spaces in BPM Studio can save time and effort in multiple ways:
- Data Spaces enable data to be easily shared between processes.
- Data Spaces can be defined once and reused - thus saving work.
- Data Spaces can sometimes eliminate the need for external databases and the necessity of writing script tasks to access them.
Billfish BPM processes can be integrated with external systems via JavaScript and server "plugins". BPM Studio provides an integrated JavaScripting environment with numerous productivity features including:
- Syntax color highlighting.
- Database access scripting templates.
- Email scripting templates.
- File management scripting templates.
- Process data item paste.
- An intutive expression editor.
BPM Studio provides the ability to assign documentary meta-data to every process object and data item. By taking advantage of this built-in documentation system, BPM Studio can generate comprehensive reports providing detailed process descriptions in both HTML and PDF formats.
BPM Studio is the only full-featured, BPMN-compliant process modeling tool available that is also 100% free! Just download, install and you're ready to begin developing
complete process applications.
Unlike other BPM vendor modeling tool "freebies", BPM Studio is the full process authoring system - not a cut-down, entry-level teaser.
Because it's 100% pure Java, it runs everywhere: Windows (7, XP, Vista), Apple Mac OS X and Linux. And - best of all - the process models that you design can be deployed on the Billfish Business Process Manager platform.
Windows 7, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Linux, or Apple Mac OSX Snow Leopard running Java SE 6, 200 MB memory and 50 MB disk space.
