[Manfred SturmMember]

Hi Dan,

please be aware that there is a “User” and a “Full” attribute view mode. To toggle between these two modes, please use the “Process->View->User View” menu.

Hope it helps!

Best regards
Manfred

[Manfred SturmMember]

Hi Rute,

Process Modeler’s “Process” menu is a document related menu, meaning only if you have opened a BPMN drawing, this menu will show. So just launching Visio will not show you the “Process” menu. To give it a start, select the BPMN template in “Start->Programs->Process Modeler 2.1” and the menu will show (if the installation is OK).

If not, further checks are:
– decrease macro security to “middle” (in Tools->Options->Security->Macros…)
– system requirements in readme

Hope it helps
Manfred

[Manfred SturmMember]

Hi Rodney,

please make sure you have met all installation requirements as listed in the readme:

* OS: Microsoft Windows™ 2000, XP Home/Professional (incl. Microsoft .NET™ 1.1)
* Visio: Microsoft Visio™ 2002 SR-1, Microsoft Office Visio™ 2003

Note: Installation requires administrator privileges. .NET 2.0 is not suported.

If nothing helps, please uninstall Visio (using the Control Panel->Add/Remove Software) and PM. Make sure too, there are no leftovers in the installtion directories. Then install at least Visio 2002-SR1 or 2003 and up (any Edition works). Installing PM should work now.

Best regards
Manfred

[Manfred SturmMember]

Hi Richard,

thanks for the feedback.

Future versions of Process Modeler will support .NET 2.0.

In the meantime and for the user’s convenience, we plan to provide automatic checks during the PM installation process.

Best regards
Manfred

[Manfred SturmMember]

Hi Francisco,

the attribute you are looking for, does not explicitly exist on this descriptive level (BPMN) of business process modeling, which is done by business analysts. But you might use annotations attached to Tasks to model this kind of already available information. Business transactions may be modeled using Sub-Processes.

Assigning applications to Tasks is a job, which is normally done by IT specialists later on in their “instrumentation” activities to make the process model executable in a process runtime environment (e.g. via XPDL or BPEL).

P.S.: the official BPMN spec has been released in may 2004, published on http://www.bpmn.org

Best regards
Manfred

[Manfred SturmMember]

The version profile looks very up-to-date!

Sometimes, following simple procedure helps to fix installation related side effects, which occasionally have been observed, when over-installing PM without prior uninstall:

1) Deinstall PM (Menu ‘Uninstall’)
2) Manually clean out the installation directory (default: C:Program FilesProcess Modeler 2.1)
3) Install PM

Manfred

[Manfred SturmMember]

Janko,

correct! Maybe an insignificant correction to your statement: BPMN element don’t have coordinates, it’s their visual representations (->shapes), which have coordinates.

Some element types (Pools, Lanes, DataObjects, Annotations, etc.) might have several representations on different Visio sheets e.g. due to the use of the “Is identical to…” function.

Manfred

[Manfred SturmMember]

Hi Janko,

in the planning for the PM 2.2 core functionality, we are considering the SimpleXML import feature, which requires Visio-related (shape coordinates, sheet information, etc.) to be added to a SimpleXML export file first.

I guess this would match your requirements, too?

Best regards
Manfred

[Manfred SturmMember]

Hi Michele,

your exception message doesn’t look like a download problem. I assume you have successfully downloaded the ‘pm21en.exe’ package file to your harddisk and then double-clicked the package file for installation, right?

Please make sure you don’t have permission or compatibility issue and carefully read the minimum system requirements on the online download page.

Or just send me your current software profile (versions of os, visio, office, .NET).

Best regards
Manfred

[Manfred SturmMember]

Hi Edward,

thanks for your report. Your bug has been acknowledged by engineering and will be fixed in next PM 2.0 service release to be expected by mid of this month.

Best regards
Manfred

[Manfred SturmMember]

Hi Simon,

well observed. Participants have been dropped, though some people liked the way how to model ‘responsabilities’ or ‘organisational structures’.

Because BPMN 0.9 (PM11) didn’t have such a construct at all, we decided to introduce Participants as a vendor extension. BPMN 1.0 then came up with the swimlane concept (Pools and Lanes), which made the Participant element almost completely obsolete. In order to remain fully BPMN 1.0 compliant, we dropped the Participants.

Preview:
Though BPMN 1.0 states in its specification on p.22 that modeling of “organisational structures” is not part on BPMN 1.0, the working group has begun to think loudly on higher level business modeling techniques, which probably covers “organisational structures” as well. But this will be a topic for BPMN 2.0.

IMHO, our field experiences show that Lanes perfectly fit the need for assigning ‘responsabilities’. Lanes even help to model ‘organisational structures’ when cascading or partially overlapping (e.g. as a matrix structure). But from the notation point of view, Participants have been a bit more elegant

Best regards
Manfred

[Manfred SturmMember]

Hi Gavin,

thanks for being so keen on the Process Documentation feature. So are we

As stated in the product feature matrix (http://www.itp-commerce.com/index.php?pageid=B_012_1&lang=en), the Process Documentation and Reporting features are not yet available, but expected to come out of QA very soon. If you have registered yourself for our newsletter (low traffic), you will be informed as soon as these new features are bundled with the releases of Business and Professional Edition.

Please come back then to http://www.itp-commerce.com for the product download and ask sales@itp-commerce.com for an evaluation extension. We’ll be happy to provide you one.

Best regards
Manfred

[Manfred SturmMember]

Hi Janko,

round trip engineering involves reverse engineering, which addresses mainly the possibility to consistently import process definitions into a tool. Somewhere on the roadmap, we have planned to have a closer look to this issue, as we feel enough market demand for it.

IMHO, I think it’s more likely that we will support Simple XML imports (or BPDM imports), than BPEL imports. Due to the nature of BPEL it is quite a challange to gain a meaningful and human readable BPMN diagram out of a (externally defined or modified) BPEL definition. But there might be contrary opinions to my statement. This area just hasn’t been researched enough yet.

Best regards
Manfred

[Manfred SturmMember]

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

[Manfred SturmMember]

Matthias,

this issue is known and currently under investigation at engineering and is expected to be solved in the next service release of PM11 (build 103).

Workaround for Build 102:
First time, the PC user starts the process modeler, he should do this with (temporarily assigned) administrative rights. The second time (and after revoking those rights again), everything works as expected.

Thank you for your patience

Manfred

[Author]

Posts