Web Commerce Interoperability: Live Protocol Demonstration by WfMC.

SAN FRANCISCO -- The Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) is assembling a live demonstration of products that have implemented the Wf-XML 2.0 web commerce protocol. Wf-XML is built upon OASIS ASAP, so it is simultaneously a demonstration of ASAP interoperability.

The ASAP/Wf-XML 2.0 demonstration will take place at BrainStorm's Business Process Management Conference (bpmconference.com) in San Francisco on June 23, both in front of an audience and online with observers around the world.

Participants who have implemented the protocol include Fujitsu Software Corporation, HandySoft and Staffware who will demonstrate the scenarios of Customer, Retailer and Manufacturer.

"The ASAP standard gives companies real-world benefits of business process interoperability without programming," said Keith Swenson, chairman of the WfMC Wf-XML Working Group, chair of the OASIS ASAP Technical Committee and chief architect of Fujitsu Software Corporation. "An example of quick, easy connections between systems supporting long-term processes would be the process cycle of buying a home, involving all players from the mortgage lender through geology reports to title search and closing. Soon Wf-XML 2.0 will be available to extend ASAP with functionality specifically for BPM engines."

"Wf-XML 2.0 addresses the significant hurdles that companies have faced in attempting to optimize business processes across organizations using different BPM engines," said Jon Pyke, WfMC chair and CTO of Staffware. "We value Fujitsu's active support in the development of Wf-XML 2.0 and the Web commerce demonstration that we will use to highlight the role of Wf-XML 2.0 and ASAP in enabling business process interoperability across some of the industry's most widely recognized BPM engines."

ASAP is a web services protocol that can be used to access a generic service that might take a long time to complete. Web services protocols allow a remote service to be accessed in a standard way. Existing protocols work best when the service can provide an answer quickly, within a minute or two at the longest. ASAP is useful when the answer might take longer than this -- for example services that last from minutes to months in duration. The service being invoked might be fully automated, a manual task that a person performs, or any mixture of the two. This capability to handle both automated and manual activities is what makes ASAP particularly suited for B2B and intra-organizational service request scenarios.

Wf-XML 2.0, from the WfMC, extends this to include BPM and workflow interchange capabilities. A business process engine is a special type of asynchronous service: it has the ability to be started, to involve people in that process, and to complete some time later. One BPM engine can be easily linked to another BPM engine using Wf-XML. Wf-XML extends ASAP by including the ability to retrieve the process definition, and to monitor the current state of a running process instance.

Over 1000 observers, mostly IT users, have registered to watch the demonstration, and be informed of the results. For more information or to sign up as an online observer please see http://www.wfmc.org/standards/wfxml_demo.htm.

About the Workflow Management Coalition

The WfMC, founded in August 1993, is a non-profit, international organization of workflow vendors, users, analysts and university/research groups. The Coalition's mission is to promote and develop the use of workflow through the establishment of standards for software terminology, interoperability and connectivity between workflow products. Comprising over 300 members throughout the world, the Coalition is the primary standards body for this significant software market. The creation of the WfMC Standards Reference Model has proved its importance in other areas of technology, most notably the ISO Seven Layer reference model for computer communications.