It's well documented by many observers (and readily admitted by Microsoft) that Human Workflow Services (HWS) within BizTalk 2004 is not really up to the job for anything other than the most simple Workflow Automation (WFA) scenarios.
Looking at the roadmap for the Microsoft product set going forward:
- There is nothing new for HWS in BizTalk 2006.
- Then there is the muted introduction of a common orchestration platform (WinOE) for all Microsoft product beyond that.
It's easy to get confused about what is the right choice for a WFA solution on a Microsoft platform.
Once the scenario gets beyond HWS then this does not mean that BizTalk is not the right product for the WFA solution. In fact it will always likely be the most appropriate choice as it is increasingly rare for any WFA solution not to include a good deal or EAI too. See my previous post on BPM for a more in depth discussion of these topics.
So given all the confusion what is the best route forward? Adoption of a workflow product to sit alongside and closely integrate with BizTalk is the route. There are several product choices for this but the main players are:
1) K2.Net (www.k2workflow.com)
2) Teamplate (www.captaris.com)
3) Ultimus (www.ultimus.com)
The one I am going to consider in more depth is K2 - to start with all I'm going to highlight is some of the key Microsoft specific points around K2:
- There is very close coupling with the whole Microsoft product suite - BizTalk obviously Active Directory, Office (including) InfoPath, SharePoint, Exchange, Outlook, Content Management Server, and even MSN Messenger.
- The BizTalk integration is very close. K2 even uses BizTalk's Business Rules Engine for it's own rules management. It leverages BizTalk's BAM. K2 workflows can trigger and be triggered by BizTalk orchestrations.
- The development environment integrates with Visual Studio.NET (supporting both C# and VB.NET) and ASP.NET.
- A lot of the code needed is generated code as .NET code. This and allows things like integration of an InfoPath form or SharePoint site into a workflow calling BizTalk orchestrations - all without writing any code
Obviously like all WFA solutions K2 provides:
- Management of assignment of tasks to people
- Exceptions processing
- Escalating of tasks based on business rules and / or schedule
- Managing task queues for individuals and groups
- Load balancing and optimizing task distribution
- Service level management.
K2 also offers monitoring, tracking, and auditing of workflows and reporting on performance and quality of work.
Going forward in coming posts I want to look at some real life scenarios and development / deployment areas around solutions using K2.