ASAP and Wf-XML Demonstration Successful

The second worldwide ASAP and Wf-XML 2.0 demonstration was completed successfully at the Business Process Seminar in Pisa Italy on October 13th 2004. This demonstration was along the same lines as that performed in June 2004 in San Francisco, expect that there was an additional implementation of the protocol, which brings the count of commercial systems implementing the protocol to 4 (Advantys, TIBCO, Handysoft, Fujitsu Interstage BPM) and 2 open source implementations (EasyASAP in C++, ASAP Reference Client in C# .Net). The seminar brought over 100 people from Italy and other places around southern Europe, and then an additional 100 people dialed in to see the demonstration on-line. The demo scenario involved starting a workflow process in an Advantys system, hosted in Nice France, which then used ASAP to start a remote subprocess in the Interstage BPM system running in California, which in turn started a "grandchild" process in the HandySoft server in Virginia. The 3 other implementations were online and ready to receive similar requests. The demonstration completed without a hitch, which is a testament to the reliabiliy inherent in the ASAP approach.

The Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) which arranged for the seminar also held a membership meeting the days before the seminar. At that meeting were discusssions on what to do now that we have demonstrated the feasibility and reliability of ASAP. We are planning two future events.

The next event will be a demonstration of the Wf-XML 2.0 capability to send process definitions to a workflow server, and to retrieve them from the workflow server. This exchange can take place in any process format, but there was overwhelming support for XPDL which is already implemented by more than a dozen process tools. The protocol to send and receive the process definition is a simple web service access, which is easy to implement. This demonstration is planned for the first week of February in conjunction with a Black Forest meeting in Miami Florida.

After that event is planned a large event in conjunction with the AIIM show in May 2005. We want to invlve 12 different workflow vendors to wshow the ability to interoperate between any of them. Also at that time we will attempt a style of integration that has not yet been demonstrated, something such as integration of activity level of processes, or history information.

Thanks are certainly due to Alaine and Arnaud of Advantys who sponsored the seminar, and is the newest implementation of ASAP, as well as TIBCO who sponsored the WfMC meeting, Justin Brunt for help with demo logistings, Handysoft, EasyASAP and .Net Reference for being participants in the demonstration, Fujitsu for providing extensive support for pushing the standard itself along, and Layna and the rest of the WfMC for arranging and pulling the event through.

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