A client-side workflow middleware in the grid
ICN'05 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Networking - Volume Part I
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INIWA03During the last years companies have been required to evolve towards flexible business processes in order to cope with different users' demands in rapid evolving markets. One of the ways selected to address this problem has been the use of Workflow Systems. Any company operates with several business processes, some of which are of crucial importance and key to the survival, and growth of a business. Workflow Systems allow all kinds of business processes to be managed more efficiently, reducing companies costs, and improving their products and customer services, giving them an important competitive edge. In this context, integration mechanisms of Workflow Systems with other applications and legacy systems are required in order to achieve an integrated business in which all information technologies work together serving the business. Due to the variety of systems and platforms, this integration requires effort, resources, and a strong knowledge of the legacy systems. Recently a number of tools, called integration platforms have appeared to solve this problem. They promise some smooth integration, but the mechanisms provided for dealing with the business process approach are not rich enough yet to express all the complexity existing in any process. IB Project tries to solve the problems exposed, quite common today, by adopting a combined solution with the best of workflow tools and integration platforms in a large ad-hoc development. IB Project uses the workflow technology of an existing workflow engine - FORO from Sema Group Sae - and incorporates the ability to invoke external agents, running in distributed environments, exchanging data and documents. This way of integration simplifies the work by allowing developers to think in terms of business processes avoiding code that is already provided. This paper will show the IB Project approach to solve the problem of integrating legacy systems and applications without losing the business perspective by using workflow concepts.