Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink, said that in previous incarnations of BPEL, the biggest thing missing was the involvement of people-based activities and workflow.

“In particular, people know more about the process and its next steps and acceptable parameters than a computer does, and so the biggest problem with BPEL was the fact that it was good at developing programmatic, orchestrated, flowcharted business process logic, but not so good at handling the variability, human interaction, and exceptions that happen with people are involved,” Schmelzer said. “As such, there were a host of alternatives and ideas that came from the workflow perspective that really put some pressure on the widespread adoption of BPEL.”

What this means is that tasks, such as approvals, ad-hoc introduction or transition of process steps, or manual data entry or configuration, can now be explicitly configured in the system without doing convoluted steps, Schmelzer said.

Moreover, while the specifications are maturing–and BPEL4People is going down the right path to include the workflow items that it was missing in the past–the IT community still needs better tooling to involve humans in process interactions, Schmelzer said.

Read more at: eWeek