Hi Janko,

as you might already know, BPEL export support will be included in the forthcoming release of the Professional Edition.

Your questions can't be answered in general, but maybe some more information and personal thoughts might guide you to a suitable solution for your challenges:

1) Simple BPMN (or "BPMN style XML" as we name it too) has been designed to provide a full structured dump of a BPMN diagram. This is due to a temporary shortcoming in the work of the BPMN working group. But a metamodel for easy data exchange (called BPDM) is in the making in the BPMN working group.

2) Mapping BPMN to BPEL is, a you noticed it, not a straight forward procedure (often called "instrumentation" or "orchestration"). Main problem here: the definition structure of BPEL and BPMN are rather different. Professional Edition addresses this challenge by providing support to prepare, transfer and deploy BPMN diagrams in your favorite BPEL server. Stay tuned for the official release this month.

3) If you are not aming for a BPEL server to execute your processes, you might feel more comfortable to use the "stupid but complete" Simple BPMN and write your own translator to support your vendor specific, non-standard process execution environment.

4) Other candidate export standards (like XPDL) are in evaluation to be included in Process Modeler, but no decision has been made so far. As well we are about to support vendor peculiarities, like those of Oracle's BPEL server (former Collaxa BPEL server), to provide smooth integrations.

5) "Without loss of any detail": of course this is always a "wishful thinking" requirement, but there are other ways to handle this. Process Modeler makes another approach by immediately assisting the user while modeling to avoid BPMN definitions, which cannot be translated into BPEL later on. So just a well defined, bit still strong subset of BPMN will be available for those diagrams, leaving you with enough modeling possibilities to design your processes.

Are these explanations of any value for you?

Best regards
Manfred