Alfresco launched free BPM engine

Alfresco loves to make problems for IT giants by its altruistic approach to business. For several years, this company is exerting pressure on ECM market leaders (Microsoft, IBM, Open Text, EMC, Oracle) by providing high-quality free/cheap open-source system Alfresco ECM. And now, the company decided to build communism in another, related IT field - BPM (Business Process Management). The new Alfresco product - Activiti is absolutely free, open-source BPM system, distributed under Apache License 2.0. To develop this system Alfresco (traditionally) enticed executives from competing project JBoss jBPM - Tom Baeyens and Joram Barrez. They were helped by the SpringSource (VMWare) developers. In result they built light-weight, fast and free product that is intended to revolutionize the BPM market.

In fact, Activiti - is not an independent application, but an engine that can be embedded into any business app (using the REST API). The idea is that any company already has existing business apps and it is more convenient to use them in automated business processes rather than a separate BPM tool. Therefore, Activity is designed around the fact, that process automation - is collaboration between business-users and IT specialists, that can integrate the BPM engine with one or several business apps. The system contains Activiti Cycle - a social tool for communication and collaboration between business-users and IT department:



In addition, Activity includes a simple user-interface (for managing tasks) and administrator modules (for modeling processes and monitoring applications). Note also that Activity supports BPMN - the standard for modeling business processes and can operate in scalable Cloud environments.

Activity is not tied to the Alfresco ECM, but is offered as an optional BPM engine for this system. There are also a number of other companies that have provided integrations. They include Spring and Liferay, as well as an iPad and iPhone client.

See also: Top 10 BPM Software