Clarifications for someone that is completely new to BonitaSoft

Q&A
1

I have a custom built form-processing website. It’s not as sophisticated as BonitaSoft, but it allows a site to create a form, attache some workflow/approvals and run reports off of the collected form data. It’s 5 year old code. It doesn’t support mobile, no LDAP, doesn’t have a lot of connectors to external data sources, etc., etc., etc. We’re trying to decide if we should modernize it or embrace something like BonitaSoft and leave the continuous development to that application.

If someone can help me clarify some assumptions, I would be so grateful.

  1. From what I can tell, BonitaSoft is a processing shell. A form is created in the studio. . . uploaded to the BPM processing server and the actors are mapped. By default, no form data is really stored. I would have to build connectors and execute INSERT and UPDATE statements to store the form data in remote systems. Is this a true statement or is the form data housed within the BPM site (where it can be queried for use in other forms and/or reports).

  2. We were hoping to convert our two customers over to BonitaSoft-driven processes (for their 2 forms) using the community edition. We would need to derive field-level data (lists) from a remote system. It doesn’t sound like that is possible in the community edition. Is that true? While we would hate to maintain those lists within the form, it’s something we might have to do to prove-out the concept. Does this sound advisable? Is there a path to get from the community edition to the subscription editions?

  3. In the event we do this, we would like to host one BPM site and sell a “form processing” site to multiple customers. I saw some posts about multi-tenancy. I’m assuming the BPM handles this nicely (for the subscription packages). Is that feasible?

  4. In the community edition, it appears that connectors are available at the pool level, but not at the form/field level. For the sake of my proof of concept, could I use the pool level connectors to get the data I need in the form questions?

Thanks for any feedback.

2

I’m not sure if I’m violating my rules by answering my own first question and adding a new one.

Regarding the transient state of form-data
I installed the sample travel request process. So it would seem "transient’ means more than something that exists in the form submission process. I’m still not sure what it means, because the form data lives somewhere and was accessible to the submitter, approver 1 and the travel manager.

So, my new question is. . … where does that data live? Is that something I can join with another database system on the EmployeeId? I didn’t see any connectors in the pool or form and I’m baffled as to how and where this data is stored (while executing the process from within the studio).

3

Hi

Here are answers to your questions:

  1. You may have seen in this process template transient data. It is true that this type of data is not saved in DB, just in memory. But we do have other types of data (process and task data) which are saved in Bonita DB.
    They can also be saved in an external DB, through connectors. Connectors exist in Community edition but have an advanced version in SP Editions, which save configuration time and errors.

  2. You are right, in the Community edition, you can’t configure connectors in fields and forms, but only at process or task level. From Teamwork SP edition, this is something you can do.

  3. Multi-tenancy, which enables to separate data from different customers is available from Performance SP Edition.

  4. Same answer as 2.

I hope it will help you to make your choice.
Regards

4

Do you have a particular reason to choose the Community edition? It seems like some of the features that you’re looking for are included in other editions.

5

You might want to look at this feature comparison:
http://www.bonitasoft.com/how-we-do-it/compare-editions

6

I’m just trying to prove the concept and if I can avoid some licensing fees for this phase, that would obviously be good!

7

Thanks for taking the time. That helps clarify a whole lot. I’m starting to realize that I can wire up the Bonita BPM engine to my existing DB/.application to get all of the process-level business data I need. It sounds as though the only downside is poor engineering/development practices.

I didn’t realize how disconnected/abstrated the form processing is (with Bonita BPM). I’m starting to see a path where I can wire up a few forms and processes to my existing application. I thought I’d have to rebuild all of it, from scratch (in Bonita BPM).