Day 4 - Human tasks

Human Tasks are an extension to BPEL made by IBM. It's quite neat since you're able to specify escalation conditions and use a whole lot of expressions to assign a human task.

The Process Server uses the term registry to denote the datasource that contains the useraccounts and roles. Registries may be the simple users and roles that exists in the WebSphere Application Server that's running the Process Server, it may be a database or it could be an LDAP directory. The latter being the most likeley, in my opinion. But for this to be really usable and to really harness the power of the expressions/conditions against the registry you really need a well maintained directory that really reflects your organisation with managers and employers etc.

From what I've seen at our clients it's most likeley that the corporate direcotry exists in an Microsoft Active Directory. My opinion is that most of our clients doesn't use simple things like specifying managers on objects in their directory and therefore limiting the possible usage of the directory, for example for the human tasks in the Process Server.