The BPMN Modeler of Intalio|Designer lets Process Analysts design any process using the BPMN specifications, then generate BPEL 2.0 code automatically. The BPMN Modeler supports the entire BPMN specification, extended with constructs for BPEL4People human workflow.

Support for Multiple Swimlanes

The BPMN Modeler can also be used for pure process modeling, when processes do not need to be deployed in a production environment. It is used by a number of higher education organizations for teaching and training purposes, as well as large companies and public sector organization for process improvement and transformation.

Support for Customizable Palettes

The BPMN Modeler is based on the Eclipse BPMN Modeler, which was originally contributed by Intalio.

Intalio|Designer includes a WYSIWYG Forms Designer for the development of custom forms used for human workflow steps, according to the BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask models. Forms can be designed in a drag-and-drop fashion using an extensive collection of widgets like text fields, check boxes, and combo boxes, or generated automatically from an XML Schema. The Forms Designer is based on the XForms standard, and support the import of existing XForms document developed with third-party tools. Form elements such as selectors can be generated automatically from database lookups, which are modeled using the Data Mapper component of Intalio|Designer.

XForms Editor

Forms designed with the Form Designer are decoupled from the workflow task manager, which responsibility is to manage the lists of tasks assigned to Roles and Users. Furthermore, the Forms Designer can be used in combination with an extensible presentation layer, allowing custom applications to be developed, offering specific life cycles for the management of human workflow tasks, and customized user interfaces. The following screenshot shows an example of such an application developed by NTT DATA INTRAMART in Japan.

Support for Customizable Stylesheets

The underlying user interface framework used by Intalio|Server is based on the Spring MVC framework, allowing developers to use virtually any technology for the presentation layer, and support for the .Net framework is offered as well. Additionally, Intalio|Designer provides an open API allowing customers and vendors to integrate their own UI framework into our product, ensuring an optimized life cycle for the UI artifacts required for process execution.

Alternatively, more complex user interfaces can be developed using Intalio|AJAX, which is based on the open source version of TIBCO General Interface™. General Interface is an open source project focused on enabling rapid creation of reliable Ajax applications, components and portlets, with the look and feel of desktop graphical user interface applications. General Interface is aligned with the industry movement towards HTTP data services. Accordingly, General Interface is intended to communicate with XML, SOAP, JavaScript and other HTTP accessible services, both at a simple level, or as part of larger SOA implementation.

Support for Embedded Documentation

Intalio|Designer also provides the ability to add files to processes for documentation purposes. Such documentation files can be accessed independently from the process, and edited using any office productivity suite such as Microsoft Office directly from Intalio|Designer. When such edits are made, new versions of the file are created, and a full versioning history is captured. Additionally, documents can be edited online using Google Apps or Zoho.

The Deployment Manager is responsible for packaging all the artifacts required for the deployment of BPMN processes in a production environment, including BPEL, XForms, XPath, XSLT, and WSDL files. The Deployment Manager supports a one-click deployment process convenient for prototyping, as well as the definition of custom deployment processes for testing, staging, and production. Additionally, the Deployment Manager is accessible through a command-line interface, allowing custom deployment scenarios to be managed from third-party system management tools. The Deployment Manager also includes advanced dependency tracking mechanisms, ensuring that all deployed artifacts are compatible with each other, and facilitating ongoing change management for processes deployed in production.

Most activities designed in a process require binding to external systems, or custom data elements provided at runtime by end users when completing human workflow tasks. For this purpose, Intalio|Designer includes a powerful Data Mapper that supports graphical data assignment and transformation for arbitrarily complex XML Schemas.

The Data Mapper produces XPath or XSLT code from graphical assignment and transformation maps. Such maps can invoke XPath functions for more complex transformations, including the invocation of external XSLT stylesheets. Furthermore, code written in any language supported by the Java Runtime Environment can be embedded into re-usable XPath functions. Currently supported languages include JavaScript, Perl, PHP, pnuts, Python, Ruby, and Tcl/Tk.

Custom XPath functions are also provided for supporting conditional logic and external database lookups or Web Service invocations. Here is an example of data mapping using string concatenation and mathematical functions on data mapped between an incoming message and a process variable.

Support for Complex Data Mapping

Integrated Development Environment: Powered by Eclipse

Intalio|Designer offers a single tool that is used by business analysts, software engineers, and system administrators for supporting the modeling of business-level processes, their binding onto external systems and user interfaces, and their deployment onto Intalio|Server respectively. As a result, all process stakeholders benefit from having a common working environment that fosters cross-functional communication and preserves the integrity of business processes over their entire life cycle, from design to deployment and optimization.

Intalio|Designer is built on top of the popular Eclipse platform. It is a collection of Eclipse plugins and runs on any of the many operating systems supported by Eclipse. The architecture is modular with several core modules that are part of the CE version and specialized optional modules that are part of the EE offering. In this case, each of these modules is simply an extra set of plugins for Eclipse. In addition to the various plugins that are part of Intalio|Designer, you can take advantage of the Eclipse platform and install whatever other plugins that you need such as version control integration, task management, database access, as well as development environments for programming languages such as Java, C++, PHP, and Python. Of course with Intalio|Designer, you never need to write any code and that is because of the powerful BPMN Designer that is the core of Intalio|Designer. BPMN diagrams are seemlessly transformed by designer into BPEL-2.0 files. They are then deployed and executed on the Intalio|Server for execution.