Select all documents of type 1099ez where the socialSecurityNumber="123-45-6789" For example, to retrieve all my tax filings for the last few years, one could formulate a query such as: By doing that, one can now retrieve such documents using richer search criteria. For example, my social security number, my salary, my dependents and other meta information related to the document. However, if when we create the document within the repository, we explicit state that the document is of "type" 1099ez, we may have defined a model of what that contains.
By associating the template with the document, we can work with it in a richer manner.įor example, if we create a document which is my tax return for 2015, then we can imagine that if we viewed it, we might see a PDF of a 1099ez (A US tax form). By doing this, we have implicit associated a type template with that document and this is very valuable. When a document is created within the ECM, we tell the ECM what "type" of document it is. Documents held within an ECM are different from a simple file. However, that is about the limit of the meta data of a file. There are other attributes of files such as their owner and the date/time they were last modified. When we think of a file on the file system of an operating system, we think of it as containing content and having a name. A number of ECM's support this standard including:ĬMIS provides the following functions and here we indicate which ones are supported by IBM BPM:
CMIS is what IBM BPM uses to interact with back-end ECM systems thus insulating BPM from any single provider. CMIS provides a vendor neutral API for interacting with ECMs. If we can define such an API then we need only write our application that interacts with an abstract ECM once and then simply choose an ECM provider to use based on other qualities such as performance, capacity, price or other features.Ĭontent Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) is an open standards protocol from the standards body called OASIS. What we need is an API that is an industry standard that each vendor that implements an ECM can expose. Each API was perfect for interacting with a specific brand of ECM however if we wished to change ECM providers, we would be stuck with the job of re-coding our applications to use the different APIs. Historically, each provider of an ECM supplied their own sets of APIs to be able to interact with it. If we consider what we want from an arbitrary ECM we will find a common set of required functions. In this section we will discuss the support provided by IBM BPM for integrating with ECMs such that content from documents can be managed as part of the process solution.Ĭontent Management Interoperability Services – CMIS In addition, the BPM product itself provides an in-built document repository. A variety of vendors make a variety of such ECMs.
An ECM is a software product that explicitly manages the existence, organization, search and retrieval of instances of documents.
Obviously these documents have to be stored somewhere within an IT system and this is where the category of software product called an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system comes into play. To process a claim, a clerk may work through a process instance which must make these documents available. This may involve an initial claim form, a police report, pictures of the accident and faxes from garages with quotes for repair. Consider an insurance claim for a car accident. Instances of document types such as these may be needed as part of the handling of a process instance. There are many solutions involving BPM that involve working with document and file content such as Microsoft Word, PDFs, Excel spreadsheets, image files and other pre-existing information items. Enterprise Content Management Integration – ECM.Working with Process Center through REST.Generated Monitor Models for a Process Application.Building Monitor models using the Model Editor.Generating events from a BPMN process (Old).
Information Sources for Business Monitor.BPEL – Business Process Execution Language.Inter-operating between a BPMN process and an SCA module.IBM Business Process Manager – Advanced.Overview of IBM Business Process Manager.