How to setup Organisation for a B2B workflow

Q&A
1

I’m trying to model and run in portal a process where two organisations send messages between themselves.

In Bonitasoft you can only have one ‘Active’ organisation published. So how would you setup two pools, one for Acme and another for NotAcme for example?

Another way this impacts the process is with Authentication, you have to specify a user who is a member of ‘the organisation’, what happens if you need two?

Am I missing something because if you can’t have two organisations you can’t run a process on the portal without creating some kind of single fake umbrella organisation. Yuck!

Is this a limitation of the community version?

2

:slight_smile: I asked about this a long time ago…

And the answer is still the same…from http://documentation.bonitasoft.com/?page=organization-overview

All the users who participate in a process must be in the same Bonita BPM organization. For example, if you use a process to track order processing with a supplier, the supplier employees who perform steps in the process must be in the organization.

There is sound rational thinking to this rather than simple organizational structural, and all to do with regulatory compliance.

The fact is that every business is solely responsible for its business processes and the outcomes.

B2B doesn’t mean I have to, or even should, provide my business partner with processes to operate. This doesn’t mean you can’t just that you have to be aware of the legal and contractual aspects of it…

The way we do this is:

Our Organization
…\dept 1
…\dept 2
…\dept 3
…\etc.
…\External Suppliers
…\Supplier1
…\Supplier2
…\etc.

However because it is our process we only have 2 or 3 people in each of the External Supplier Groups. We severely limit the number of people who interact with our system and processes for many reasons.

The other way to do it is of course to have TWO Bonitasoft installs one for each Business, this may be preferable for larger companies. Each has its own Organization and processes.

Then implement a set of REST calls between the servers to do the job…

Login
Start our/their process
they do the work
their system replies with REST updates…
Logout

This decouples the two businesses completely and you don’t have to worry about the Organizations at all, you just send them a message and they return one back. But this requires each others development teams to work together… :frowning:

regards
Seán

PS: While this may not be the complete answer you’re hoping for, it does indicate a possible solution, please mark as resolved.

3

Hi Sean

Pretty much what I expect, thanks for taking the time with your comprehensive response!

I’m doing the first option at the moment. I understand your rationale, not convinced it makes for simple B2B modelling but is something I can work with.

Best Regards
Simon