Business Process Management

In my daily work I use the webMethods Suite to accomplish BPM challenges. Although these tools are pretty good I was wondering what functionalities I could get without paying money. Therefore I built up a virtual machine with components of the Intalio Community Edition. In the future posts I want to compare some key functionalities of both suites. What are the core functionalities which I expect from a BPM solution?

• Designing the process with a graphical tool

• Generation of web forms for user tasks

• Adapters to database systems or third party software should be available or easy to create

• Monitoring of process instances

That are only basic functionalities which I want to use to analyze the degree of maturity of available open source bpm solutions. For running a productive BPM system you have to consider many other requirements, which I will have not planned to analyze in the near future.