Alfresco Provides First Community Release with Activiti BPM Integration

SOURCE: Alfresco

Alfresco, the open platform for social content management, today announced the industry’s first preview of the Activiti Business Process Management (BPM) workflow engine integrated with Alfresco. Fully compliant with the industry standard BPMN 2.0, the Activiti integration extends Alfresco’s workflow features by providing developers more flexibility and integration capabilities for process flows between Alfresco and other business applications. The integration is being offered through an update to Alfresco Community, version 3.4.e and is available for immediate download.

Since its launch last year, Activiti has worked as an independently run and branded open source project distributed under the Apache license. In response to accelerated development and increasing demand from the community, Alfresco has released a preview of the integration as the first proof point of Activiti built into a business application.

“The replacement of jBPM with Activiti in Alfresco is just the beginning. It’s the start of a seamless integrated environment that combines Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Adaptive Case Management (ACM) and Business Process Management (BPM),” said Tom Baeyens, Activiti Project Lead. “Moving forward, our new case management vision will focus on taking BPM out of its niche and opening it up to a much wider audience, fostering an environment for even greater innovation.”

Activiti is a lightweight workflow and Business Process Management (BPM) Platform targeted at business people, developers and system admins to deliver a powerhouse workflow tool to drive content needs from within the Alfresco community. At its core is a super-fast and rock-solid BPMN 2.0 process engine for Java that provides flexibility for greater integration capabilities between Alfresco and other business applications, giving developers more out-of-the-box functionality.

This preview release will enable early adopters to compare the existing jBPM workflow with the Activiti BPM environment while at the same time start experimenting with the integration into other tools to create different types of workflow applications. The integration of Activiti and Alfresco is key for any organization that wants to review and approve content that needs to go through a complex review and approval process, such as contracts, sales forecasts, budgets and press releases. This will empower collaboration without losing control of the latest version or the traceability of revisions.

The production ready version of this integration will be delivered in the next major release of Alfresco Enterprise later this year in the Q4 timeframe. Using Activiti, developers can define new BPMN 2.0 workflow definitions and add them to Alfresco for managing document centric processes. For the first time, organizations can leverage the standalone BPMN 2.0 engine within their own content repository platforms using the Alfresco integration as an example of what can be done.

Alfresco has seen major adoption of its open source and open standards social content management platform throughout the world, with more than three million downloads of Alfresco Community.

Alfresco Community 3.4.e is available now and can be downloaded at http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Alfresco_Community_3.4.e_Download. The Activiti BPM platform can be downloaded at http://www.activiti.org/download.html.