Suggestions on how to integrate Camunda, ECM, Visual Form Designer to create a base suite?

[knitt...@gmail.com]

Hi,

I'm a student attending a class/unit about BMP, though I'm a developer, the class focusses more on the modelling (management) part and on using tools for faster process definition and management. As part of a project I need to create a sort of BMP suite by integrating other tools like an ECM (maybe Alfresco), a reporting engine (I'll probably use BIRT) and something to generate forms that doesn't involve coding the HTML or the JSP manually.

I understand that camunda is a framework/platform and not a complete suite ready for end users, and that a lot of automation will either be hard or required a lot of code, thing is the project should focus on as less coding as possible (I'm a developer so I don't mind some coding :) ). Any suggestions or resources I could use to study how to hack up something like this?

The system needs to offer the basic stuff that a BMP suite does but in a more end user friendly way, at this point I'm looking for how to integrate Alfresco (or some other ECM), generating Birt Reports and designing forms with Vaadin and their Visual Designer (still have no idea if this will work).

Regards,

Sérgio Lopes

[Christian Lipphardt]

Hi Sérgio,

For sure you can create a BPM Suite using camunda BPM as the process engine.

The question is what you wanna built?

For example, you can use one of our pre-built distributions and just deploy Alfresco as a WAR and write some glue code so it talks to the process engine and vice versa.

Then write a simple Single Page javascript application using one of the popular frameworks out there (we use AngularJS for example), which allows you to create forms, upload documents and/or creates BIRT reports out of the engine's database.

Everything wired together using REST or so.

So it really depends on your requirements and how much work you want to invest and what your goal is.

Cheers,

Christian

[knitt...@gmail.com]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply, and your question is also one I'm trying to answer given this is an academic project, still trying to understand both the goals and what I have to do.

> For sure you can create a BPM Suite using camunda BPM as the process engine.
> The question is what you wanna built?

A simple suite that has document management, report generation and UI creation using some WYSIWYG tool. At this point I'm doing initial research on to what other tools are available or better integrate with camunda.

> For example, you can use one of our pre-built distributions and just deploy Alfresco as a WAR and write some glue code so it talks to the process engine and vice versa.

This is one of the approaches I'm leaning to.

> Then write a simple Single Page javascript application using one of the popular frameworks out there (we use AngularJS for example), which allows you to create forms, upload documents and/or creates BIRT reports out of the engine's database.
> Everything wired together using REST or so.

I would prefer not to write the form editor as that would go out of scope but it is one option I'm evaluating.

> So it really depends on your requirements and how much work you want to invest and what your goal is.

As I started, that is hard to answer. Evaluating the existing solutions, how I would go about integrating them into camunda, and how far I need to go (if a prototype or a complete suite) is what I'm doing.

Again, thanks for your comments, I understand my questions is to broad/open, but at this point I don't have much to work with :)

Regards,

Sérgio Lopes