Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), one of the key technologies for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), has become the accepted mechanism for defining and executing business processes in a common vendor-neutral way. Companies ranging from Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and BEA to smaller organizations such as Fuego and Lombardi have committed to BPEL as a building block for SOA. BPEL, which has been designed specifically for defining business processes, supports typical interactions such as synchronous and asynchronous operation invocation, sequential and parallel flows, message correlations, fault and compensation handlers and activities triggered by events. Business processes often require human interactions as well.
Since the BPEL specification doesn't address them, you might think BPEL isn't suitable for business processes that involve people. But that's not the case. In this article, we'll look at different choices for human workflow support - including future possible extensions to the BPEL specification and current vendor solutions - and analyze their relevance in practical scenarios. We'll also discuss real-world scenarios in which BPEL and human workflow services are used and show how one company is using BPEL to integrate people with processes - and the benefits achieved through this approach.
