A quick look at Oracle Process Cloud Service

Oracle Process Cloud Service is Oracle’s rapid process automation in the Cloud. It is more or less BPM in the cloud. This service allows you to quickly and easily create business processes like you are used to with Oracle BPM, only now in the cloud. In this post I’ll give a quick tour of this service.

So let’s start with the Process Cloud Service. The landing page already gives you loads of features.

Here you have your spaces in which your processes will be saved, and where you start building new applications.

So let’s create a new one.

And create a process.

When creating a new application, you’ll get the choice to start with a pre-defined pattern. In our case we want to start with a Web Form. This means that a BPM process is started after filling in a Web Form. We will create this form later.

So now we have an empty process. Pretty simple right?

The toolbar on the right allows you to add steps to the flow.

We can start implementing it right now. Let’s start by implementing the start trigger. Note that because we choose the Web Form pattern earlier, the Trigger is already set on Form.

When clinking of Implementation we will see all the possibilities we have.

We can give it a title, description and specify the Web Form. You can choose an existing form (if you have one) or create a new one. In this case we will create a new one.

Creating a form is pretty straight-forward. You can create tabs, input fields etc. Please bare in mind that Web Forms correpsond to business objects in your process flow. So making changes afterwards will also change the business objects and can possibly break data mappings!

So afer finishing the Web Form, we return to our process and add a approval task for example. We can do this by simply dragging the approval task onto the line.

The properties for the task will give you loads of setting as you might expect. We will define this task on the existing Web Form, and give the user two outcomes: approve or reject.

Based on the outcome of the task we can decide what to do. In this case we tinker on in the process and send an email when the user rejects.

After you are done with the process you can “Play” with it. The Play function allows you to walk through the complete process one step at a time.

So there you have it. I’ve given you a quick overview of the Process Cloud Service from Oracle. This service offers you a complete tool set for rapid business process automation in the cloud. Almost all the features from the “on premise” BPM Suite are there: business rules, workflow tasks, web forms etc, and all in a beautiful web based environment. And this is only the first release. New features and functionality will be released in the future, making it a strong Cloud product.