Copyright © Jason Woodruff. Visit the original at http://jasonwoodruff.wordpress.com/2008/06/03/194/
I came across a BPM on-demand solution yesterday http://www.runmyprocess.com. This service is, I think, designed ‘restfully’ from the bottom-up. Certainly it seems oriented towards resources as the process component. I’m experimenting with the service and looking at how I can integrate hosted Live Forms (http://www.frevvo.com) with a hosted workflow. I don’t think this is likely to prove too difficult and a technical person would likely get this licked in seconds. I’ll post about any successes.
The service looks to be quite new: the v1.0 documentation was published last month and I’m the 5th person to register on the forum (but it is in French and that may be a disincentive!). They are promoting integration with well known SaaS apps like Salesforce, Zoho, 37 signals, and Google, and there are demos showing how to assemble processes to do this.
One thing I’d like the folks at runmyprocess to do is be a bit more explicit about the standards they are following and their architecture. But the service is using Restlet*. The process designer looks and feels like BPMN.
I think they need to make it easy to import and export processes. I don’t think there is any support for XPDL, but that might not be appropriate. Users need to stay because they want to not because they are locked-in!
I think this service is probably forging the future of BPM for the web. I expect we’ll see a growing ecosystem of rest-based business style services emerging. Good luck to runmyprocess (needs a shorthand?).
Runmyprocess is running a competition for projects with the prize of free hosting for a year.
* Awaiting publication of the Restlet book, expected publication date 28th May according to Amazon, but that seemingly hasn’t been met.
