Adeptia BPM Server offers powerful and comprehensive functionality for integration. This includes Data Transport, Data Transformation and Web Services.

Business process management and integration require ability to transport and replicate data from one location to another application or user. This must be done in a reliable, robust manner to ensure data integrity and delivery.

Adeptia BPM Server delivers comprehensive message transport capability facilitating assured, secure and timely delivery of business information to cross functional departments, and partner organizations. The data transport module facilitates end to end data delivery management through easy configuration and use of standards based data protocols. This allows synchronization, aggregation, distribution, replication and validation of data within organizations and across firewalls. formats. The Schema Designer allows IT users to specify metadata for all commonly used file formats such as Flat Files, Fixed-length positional files, EDI, XML, Microsoft Excel, as well as relational databases like Oracle, SQL Server, IBM DB2 and MySQL etc. Complex metadata information can be provided including data field element names, attributes, field types as well as hierarchical record structure.

Key Data Transport Features

Adeptia BPM Server offers powerful data transport functionality that can be configured using a wizard-driven, form-based interface; without writing a single line of code. The product's loosely-coupled architecture allows users to configure these features thereby creating re-usable "services" which can be used both for receiving (sources) and sending (targets) data messages. This functionality can be classified into the following categories:

Internet transport protocols:

The BPM Server provides easy connectivity for relational databases such as Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 and MySQL. It includes common JDBC-based database drivers and enables wizard-driven setup. To enable unparalleled ease-of-use for novice users, SQL queries are automatically generated. Users may setup complex views and joins across multiple database instances. Adeptia BPM server allows both "inserts" and "updates" into database tables. Stored Procedures can also be called both to retrieve data as well as to load data into databases.

The data transport module can use any Java Messaging Service (JMS) standards-based message queue server for "publish-subscribe" as well as point to point communications. This ensures guaranteed, asynchronous, and reliable delivery of data. The BPM Server can deliver as well as read data messages from a JMS-based message bus. It also allows configuration of JMS triggers to enable automated execution of process flows upon receipt of a messages.

Adeptia BPM Server includes support for Java Connector Architecture (JCA) that allows users to configure adapters for bi-directional, real-time connectivity with third-party applications such as SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards etc. for enterprise application integration. For easy and quick deployment, Adeptia offers more than fifty JCA-compliant adapters as optional components. Installation and customization of adapters is wizard driven for ease-of-use.

Adeptia offers optional adapters to access data from legacy flat file databases such as VSAM (Virtual Storage Access Method), ISAM (Indexed Storage Access Method) and Cobol Copybooks. Metadata and file formats: Adeptia BPM Server includes pre-built adapters for ASCII flat files, Microsoft Excel, Fixed-length files, complex XML messages and EDI. Users can create schemas to easily specify meta-data information to specify structure and meaning of data messages. These schema services allow the BPM Server to parse and process incoming data and correctly structure it for sending to internal applications or external partners.

The BPM Server includes comprehensive security functionality that enables encryption and decryption of data for transmission and receipt respectively. It supports digital certificates management as well as PGP-style public-private key encryption.

Data Transformation is critical for automating process integration. Data is often received in different formats and needs to be converted into other formats for target applications or for users to review. Complex mapping rules need to be defined as these formats are converted. This usually requires tedious and extensive coding while the tools available to simplify this process are expensive and only offer limited capabilities. Adeptia provides functionality to do all this quite easily and without any need for coding. This data transformation capability is a strength of Adeptia and differentiates it from other BPM products in the market.

The following two components provide the Data Transformation functionality of the Adeptia BPM Server: Schema and Data Mapper.

Schema is a structure of a file format and it specifies information on the different data fields and records that are in a message or data file. Designing a schema is the process of providing metadata information. Schema Designer is a wizard driven Web-interface that allows IT users to design and manage data formats. The Schema Designer allows IT users to specify metadata for all commonly used file formats such as Flat Files, Fixed-length positional files, EDI, XML, Microsoft Excel, as well as relational databases like Oracle, SQL Server, IBM DB2 and MySQL etc. Complex metadata information can be provided including data field element names, attributes, field types as well as hierarchical record structure.

Schema Parser allows data messages and files of different formats to be automatically processed based on the schema definitions. This is a run-time service that can be orchestrated by a user as a task in a process flow. It uses schema (metadata) rules as defined in the Schema Designer to identify the format and structure of a message file and so parse that file into records and data elements. This parsed data can then be sent to the Mapping engine to be transformed into another format Data Mapper.

The Data Mapper is a Web-based interface for managing data transformation rules. It is a graphical tool that enables visual and rapid specification of complex business rules in easy to understand English rather than code. It auto-generates data transformation code in a fraction of time compared to custom manual coding. The Data Mapper eliminates the need for the intricate, time consuming and error-prone process of manually writing thousands of lines of data mapping code. Collaboration and mapping rules management is simplified by auto-generation of transformation rules in PDF format for easy documentation, business user sign-offs and archival.

Data Mapper simplifies management of mapping rules because these rules are:

• Defined using a visual, drag-and-drop interface
• Specified in easy to understand English
• Documented in PDF directly from the code
• Archived for later edits
• Directly converted into program executable code

Mapping rules are easy to specify. For any selected target data field, a text area is provided where a user can build complex transformation rules for that field. For ease of use, the Data Mapper consists of built-in libraries of Math, String, Aggregate, Conditional and Boolean functions for data manipulation. Text area is also provided for users to specify comments where they can note the versioning information, history and any other context for the mapping rules for that field. This simplifies edits and future manageability of the mapping rules.

The Mapping Engine is the heart of the data transformation module of the BPM Server. It takes the mapping rules as defined in the Data Mapper and applies those rules to the parsed data to create the transformed output. Adeptia has designed the Mapping Engine to be functionally powerful so it can apply complex rules to complex data structures.

Adeptia BPM Server supports processing of both single-record messages as well as bulk data in the form of multiple-record data files. The Parser and Mapping engine have highly scalable performance so the BPM Server can scale up to handling hundreds of megabytes of data files that may contain hundreds of thousands of records. The BPM Server does this in an efficient manner allowing it to offer speed and throughput that is only matched by dedicated hardware appliance-type of solutions.

Comprehensive support for Web Services includes ability to utilize any external Web Service as an activity in a process flow. This includes support for introspection of UDDI/WSDL and both RPC and message-style invocation.

Process flows can be triggered by and even exposed as Web Services by using the Publish-WS capability of the product. WSDL is automatically generated which is needed for the client program to invoke this published web service.