Which artifacts should I use?

IBM® Business Process Manager has a number of different artifacts that you can use to create or modify a user interface. These artifacts consist of client-side human services, heritage human services, coaches, heritage coaches, and stock controls.

To help you determine which of these artifacts you should use, there are factors you must consider. The following diagram summarizes your choices and the text discuss these factors to help you with your choices.

New or existing human services? Existing leads to use heritage coaches where you decide whether to use heritage coaches or to use coaches with stock controls. New leads to use client-side human services with coaches and stock controls.

Your first decision is whether to use client-side human services or heritage human services. Client-side human services are the latest technology in IBM Business Process Manager. Client-side human services are built using the Process Designer web editor and run in a web browser. Generally, you should use client-side human services unless one or more of the following conditions apply:

You are editing a human service that existed prior to version 8.5.5. Human services in previous versions are now known as heritage human services.
You are editing a heritage human service that was created in version 8.5.5.
You want to use some of the features in heritage human services that are not available in client-side human services, such as collaboration. The collaboration feature allows multiple users to work on the same coach instance simultaneously. For information, see Setting up collaboration features for business users.
You do not need the enhancements and features of the new Process Designer web editor and you prefer to work in the familiar Process Designer desktop editor for your process application development.

If one or more of these conditions apply, use heritage human services. Heritage human services run on the server but display their user interfaces in a web browser. To create or edit heritage human services you use the Process Designer desktop editor. Note that a process application can have both heritage human services and client-side human services and both types can use the same coach views.

If you are using client-side human services, you are automatically using coaches and coach views. Because the stock controls are coach views, you can use these basic user interface elements to create complex coaches and coach views.

If you are using heritage human services, you then must decide whether to use coaches or heritage coaches for a particular user interface. A heritage human service can have coaches and heritage coaches in its flow. Generally, you should use coaches unless you are updating existing heritage coaches. Heritage coaches are user interfaces that were created in IBM BPM prior to version 8.0. For these user interfaces, using heritage coaches means that you are updating the user interface using the same artifact that was originally used to create it. However, if the update is extensive in scope (that is, you need to update a number of similar heritage coaches), consider replacing these heritage coaches with coaches to take advantage of the reusability of coach views and the stock controls that IBM BPM provides.