The Process Center repository

The Process Center includes a repository for all processes, services, and other assets created in the IBM® Business Process Manager authoring environments, Process Designer and Integration Designer.

Process Designer is available in both editions of the product. An IBM BPM Advanced deployment environment also offers case management and Integration Designer with its associated editors and adapters.

Process Center is a software component that runs as a server where Process Designer and Integration Designer share assets, in effect letting them develop business processes cooperatively in a highly interactive manner. These business processes can use monitoring points that are created with the Business Monitor development toolkit. The result is a business process that can be examined at run time for effectiveness under real working conditions.

In the diagram that follows, you see several related components that together let you build complex business processes.

Relationship of Process Designer, Integration Designer, Business Monitor and Process Center

The Process Center includes two servers, the Process Center server and the Performance Data Warehouse server. The Process Center Server allows 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.

In the authoring environments, you can create process models, services, and other assets within process applications.

The Process Center console provides the tools that you need to maintain the repository.

From the Process Center console, you can create process applications and toolkits and grant other users access to those process applications and toolkits.
From the Process Center console, administrators install process applications that are ready for testing or production on the process servers in those environments.
From the Process Center console, administrators manage running instances of process applications in configured environments.

The Process Center console provides a convenient location in which to create and maintain high-level containers such as process applications and toolkits. Administrators who do not actively work in the Designer view can use the Process Center console to provide a framework in which BPM analysts and developers can build their processes and underlying implementations. Another primary task for administrators is managing access to the Process Center repository by setting up the appropriate authorization for users and groups.

Users with appropriate authorization can perform some administrative tasks directly in Process Designer and Integration Designer. For example, a developer with write access to the process application who wants to capture the state of all project assets at a significant stage of development can create a snapshot while working in the Designer view.