IBM® Business Process Manager is a comprehensive business process management platform, providing full visibility and insight to managing business processes. It provides tooling and a runtime environment for process design, execution, monitoring and optimization, along with basic system integration support. The product can be configured to support various levels of complexity and involvement with business process management.
The components of IBM Business Process Manager provide a unified BPM repository; tools for authors, administrators, and users; and a runtime platform. The following diagram illustrates a typical IBM Business Process Manager configuration:
- From the IBM Process Designer and IBM Integration Designer authoring environments, developers connect to IBM Process Center. From either of these GUI-based application development tools, developers can create, test, debug, and deploy business applications. Choose one tool or the other, depending on the type of application you are developing. There might also be cases where using both tools brings significant advantages.
- In the Process Designer and Integration Designer authoring environments, process and service designers create deployable process applications and reusable toolkits. Process applications contain process models and service implementations, including the supporting files that are required. The process applications are stored in Process Center repository so that they can be shared.
- The Process Center includes two servers, the Process Center server and the Performance Data Warehouse server. These servers allow developers that are working in Process Designer to run their process applications and store performance data for testing and playback during development efforts. Performance Data Warehouse retrieves tracked data from Process Server or Process Center server at regular intervals.
- Process Center also supports numerous administrative functions. From the Process Center Console, administrators install process applications that are ready for staging, testing, or production on the process servers. The administrators can also manage running instances of process applications in configured environments.
- Install process applications on a process server for staging, testing, and production. The runtime environments support Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) 2.0 processes. IBM Business Process Manager Advanced also supports Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) processes.
- From the Process Admin Console and Performance Admin Console, administrators can manage and maintain all runtime servers. Use the Process Admin Console to manage the Process Center server and process servers in your runtime environments. Use the Performance Admin Console to identify performance bottlenecks and to capture instrumentation data for further analysis.
- Use the administrative console to create and manage objects such as resources, applications, and servers. In addition, use the administrative console to view product messages.
- Use Business Space to create custom business spaces that provide widgets for monitoring or administering different aspects of your system. For example, you can monitor business activities, services, and system health or administer mediation policies and business calendars. You can also create a business space with the Human Task Management widgets and use it to participate in business processes.
- Using Process Portal, process participants can connect to the Process Center server or a Process Server in any configured runtime environment, whether a process is being developed, tested, or has been released to a production environment.
- Manage Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) process instances in the Business Process Choreographer Explorer or in Business Space.