Authoring tools

Process Designer

Process Designer is available in all editions of the product. IBM Business Process Manager Advanced also offers case management and Integration Designer with its associated editors and adapters.

Process Designer provides several user interfaces where you can model, implement, simulate, and inspect business processes and cases with the advanced edition. You create and manage process applications, toolkits, tracks, and snapshots in the Process Center Console. You can create process models, reports, and simple services in Process Designer. You can run and debug processes in the Inspector. And you can run simulations in the Optimizer.

Process Designer helps you develop business processes. With an easy-to-use graphics-oriented tool, you can create a sequence of actions that compose a business process, and you can redraw that process over time as circumstances change. If one or more activities require access to large backend systems or services that provide data for the business process, for example to get information on customers, you can meet that need using Integration Designer. Using a simple interface, an activity in Process Designer can call a service created in Integration Designer. That service can use mediation flows to transform, route, and enhance data and adapters to get to many backend systems in standard way. In short, Process Designer focuses on the business process and Integration Designer focuses on automated services to complement the business process. See Getting started with IBM Process Designer.

Process applications that are developed in Process Designer can at any time be run on the Process Center server or saved to a snapshot and deployed on the Process Server. The same is true of services that are developed in Integration Designer and associated with process applications.

Cases

Process Designer simplifies the job of designing and building cases. Business process management and case management are two approaches to building a process. The type of business situation you are addressing determines which approach you use. Case management is suitable to situations where events determine the process. For example, a car crash leads to a dynamic process created by an insurance representative. This representative selects tasks to get the situation resolved. In other words, cases, unlike business process definitions, are less structured and determined more by a person's judgment at run time. You can use the Case Type editor to build cases in a similar manner to a business process, often by using the same tools. You can also test your case in Process Portal. See Business process management and case management.

Case management functions are only available if you have IBM BPM Advanced with the Basic Case Management feature installed.

To install the Basic Case Management feature, see Adding the Basic Case Management feature to IBM Business Process Manager

Integration Designer

Integration Designer provides editors and aids to help developers create complex automated processes and services (such as SCA modules, mediations, and BPEL processes). It is available as part of the IBM Business Process Manager Advanced package or as a stand-alone toolset for other uses.

IBM Integration Designer has been designed as a complete integration development environment for those building integrated applications. Integrated applications are not simple. They can call applications on Enterprise Information Systems (EIS), involve business processes across departments or enterprises, and invoke applications locally or remotely written in various languages and running on various operating systems. The components are created and assembled into other integrated applications (that is, applications that are created from a set of components) through visual editors. The visual editors present a layer of abstraction between the components and their implementations. A developer using the tools can assemble an integrated application without detailed knowledge of the underlying implementation of each component.

Integration Designer tools are based on a service-oriented architecture. Components are services and an integrated application that involves many components is also a service. The services that are created comply to the leading, industry-wide standards. BPEL processes, which also become components, are similarly created with easy-to-use visual tools that comply to the industry-standard Business Process Execution Language.

In the Integration Designer paradigm, components are assembled in modules. Imports and exports are used to share data between modules. Artifacts placed in a library can be shared among modules.

Modules and libraries can be associated with a process application for use with the Process Center and can be used as services by processes that are created in Process Designer. In such cases, they can also be deployed with the process application.

Alternatively, modules and libraries can be deployed directly to the test environment or to the Process Server. You can also use mediation modules to create mediation flows, which you can deploy to the Process Server.