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Good practice – Ensure the health of your BPMN processes by using the JavaScript loop detector and process monitor
By Phil Coulthard There are tools in IBM® Business Process Manager (BPM) that help you ensure the health of your Business process Modeling Notation (BPMN) processes: JavaScript loop detector: This tool is in IBM BPM V8.5.5 and available as an interim fix (see APAR JR48395) for V8.0.1.1, V8.0.1.2, and V8.5.0.1. With this tool installed and enabled, the engine […]
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Good practice – Use IBM BPM Advanced, an enterprise service bus, or both to expose services to your business processes that use BPMN
By Phil Coulthard Business processes orchestrate services and people. Most business processes require services, such as web services or REST services, to perform their business functions. However, because IBM® Business Process Manager (BPM) Standard is intended for the business developer more so than the integration developer, there is limited support in IBM BPM Standard for accessing […]
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Good practice – Use an offline process server for production
By Phil Coulthard In IBM® Process Center, you can register online process servers and offline process servers. Online process servers are convenient for easily deploying snapshots to them by interactively using the Process Center user interface. However, for security reasons, it is a good practice to register the process server cell that runs your processes […]
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Good practice – Diligently deal with faults when invoking external services
By Phil Coulthard Well-designed external and Advanced Integration services have modeled faults for business exceptions such as “insufficient funds” and often have unmodeled faults for technical exceptions such as “network failure” issues. When you are invoking services from a process, design your process to deal with both types of faults. Typically, a business exception can […]
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Good practice – Do not use IBM BPM as a system of record
By Phil Coulthard Business processes naturally use business data in the form of variables to represent the process state and affect the process flow. However, do not consider this data a system of record (SOR). IBM® Business Process Manager should always work with external systems of record to access and update data. Use the business data […]
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Good practice – Have a plan for regularly upgrading IBM BPM
By Phil Coulthard Like all software, IBM® Business Process Manager (BPM) is constantly improving. Every so often IBM “rolls up” (consolidates) all fixes into a new fourth digit fix pack or third digit modification release. These releases typically contain many critical fixes. To avoid experiencing a serious issue that a fix was made available for in […]
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Good practice – Plan your release-to-release migration
By Michael Scheible Before you migrate from a version or release to another version or release, for example from V8.0.x to V8.5.x, in any production environment, make sure that you have migrated your staging or test environment and have tested your applications in the new environment. Migrate to a new version for one or more of […]
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Good practice – Use the rolling upgrade option when you update IBM BPM
By Allen Chan If you install IBM® Business Process Manager (BPM) fix packs V7.5.1.2, V8.0.1.2, V8.5.0.1, or upgrade to V8.5.5 or V8.5.6 from V8.5.0.1 or V8.5.5, you can use the rolling upgrade option. By using the rolling upgrade approach, you can incrementally upgrade one process server at a time, starting with test, then staging, and […]
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Good practice – Purge data regularly
By Michael Scheible If your IBM® Business Process Manager data grows without bounds, it can over time lead to disk space issues and to performance issues as database queries take longer and longer to process. Therefore, it is important to have a policy of continuously removing older data. There are a number of places within […]
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Good practice – Specify configuration values in 100Custom.xml
By Phil Coulthard There are a number of XML-based configuration files for IBM™ Business Process Manager that you should never directly edit: 99Local.xml. 00Static.xml 50AppServer.xml 60Database.xml 80EventManager.xml 98Database.xml To ensure that you do not lose changes when you migrate to a new release, always edit the configuration values in 100Custom.xml instead of editing the configuration […]