Cloud/Virtualization Management

SmartCloud Orchestrator (SCO) provides cloud management services that enable customers to accelerate delivery of cloud-based solutions. Included within SCO is IBM Business Process Manager (BPM).  A feature-rich offering, BPM is both powerful and complex. While BPM can present a challenging learning curve, the things it enables you to do are well worth the journey.

I have developed four videos that demonstrate an easy way to get started using BPM to build processes within IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator. Each video shows how to use a variety of out-of-the-box functionality to develop, deploy and run business processes quickly--from scratch. A basic understanding of business process and Cloud technology concepts is helpful, but not required.

The videos should be watched in order, as content covered in each one is leveraged in the ones that follow.  Currently the videos contain no audio.

Part 1 - Building and deploying a simple Self-Service Offering

The first video explains how to develop a Self-Service Offering easily within the BPM Designer tool and quickly deploy and run it within SmartCloud Orchestrator. The demonstration leverages a sample application from the toolkits provided by the product and shows basic implementations which obtain user input, passing variables and accessing the variable in the Inbox.

This video covers these important steps:

• Creating a new process application
• Importing toolkits
• Duplicating  processes and human services
• Creating  a Self-Service Category and Offering
• Linking a business process and a human service
• Accessing Self-Service Offering and Inbox content

Part 2 - Basic functionality to control your process flow

The second video explains fundamental control items for implementing business process workflows such as input fields, button actions, decision gateways and variable passing. Furthermore it shows how to build your own offering based on legacy code or toolkit implementations.

This video covers these important steps:

• Reusing existing application components
• Modifying a process workflow
• Creating a simple user interface
• Assigning and exchanging variables Using decision gateways

Part 3 - Integration of toolkit components into your process flow

The third video shows how to leverage toolkit implementations and integrate them into your existing process implementation. The example is based on the generic REST call implementation, and it shows how to build a front end which requests information and then displays the values which are input in the user interface within the Self-Service Offering.

This video covers these important steps:

• Importing an implementation from a toolkit into your process workflow
• Adjusting UI components, variables and data mapping
• Executing  a REST call to query information about the runtime environment

Part 4 - Customization of an existing Self-Service Offering

The final video in this series demonstrates the reuse an existing Self-Service Offering. The offering can be used as-is or customized for the new offering. The example is based on the virtual system pattern deployment offering, which is available out of the box with the product.  To show the customization, the layout of the user interface is changed and a client logo will be added.

This video covers these important steps:

• Reusing an existing Self-Service Offering
• Customizing the offering
• Adding an image to an application for use in the offering

You can also find the entire set of videos via the following playlist link on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiD3_RDV00JcdqgMo2pQumJ5kDZPJwUvT