I have just had a heck of a time with installing BPA (Architect) Evaluation on a Windows Server 2003 machine. There were no inherent issues with the product itself, but some gotchas that I thought I might point out. For the following, I assumed you are installing on a single machine for testing/evaluation purposes like I was.

For one, if you were familiar with BPA 10.1.3.3, there is no longer an auto-installable olite database option. You must use Oracle XE Universal (or better) and you should have it installed locally prior to installing BPA. Note: You should use XE Universal specifically so you get the AL32UTF8 character set that is expected by the BPA install.

After I got the character set squared away, I continued to receive a database connection error

Oracle has made some great strides with their BPM and SOA offerings. For M&S, combining process and technology has become even more exciting with Oracle’s tools. For the first time, Oracle has made it possible for our consultants to more easily bring together best of breed solutions (IDS Scheer’s ARIS and Oracle SOA) and leading industry standards (BPMN, BPEL, and BPEL4People) to our implementations, which typically involve some level of process management/improvement and technology automation (workflow and reporting).

Following is a quick image of how each person in an organization fits into our approach when combining process with technology using Oracle technologies:

I have been involved in the Fusion Middleware 11g beta program as well as participating in other ways as a member of the Advisory Board for Oracle Portal and Oracle SOA Suite. Although I can’t say much at this time since not much has been publicized, I can tell you that there is some exciting new features coming for developers, administrators, and end-users.

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g will prove to be a very large release that is both deep and broad, covering major enhancements that really span the entire Fusion Middleware Suite. As more information becomes public (or I am authorized to share more), I will do so on this blog.

Until then, just get ready.

Oracle BPA does a great job importing into BPEL, but here are a few items that need to be manually configured. Here is just a quick note on my findings to date:

• Process Payloads need to be copied, Assigns to set up parameters
• Import from BPA to JDeveloper tool, the build.xml and build properties are often missing and need to be copied from other projects
• Human Tasks need to have forms assigned
• Embedded Java tasks cannot be round-tripped back into BPA, so they shouldn’t be used