Its interesting that you should start focusing on ECM systems (a document or object repository typically) as a service that publishes events. I hadn’t thought to worry about that interface to a BPMS since as you say, most vendors have provided the integration between their own systems anyway.

I would also say that with ECM repositories I have worked with they provide fairly open and simple approaches to identifying these events. I have seen JMS events at the most ’standard’ level, through to a published document index database schema, enabling triggers and ODBC/JDBC access for polling of events. Either way, the issue of integration with a new BPMS was typically solved once at the start of a project and reused for every new process. Often aligning the update of shared metadata between the products was more tricky that the proprietary access to events.

As you say, exposing the events in a standard way would simplify interoperability between BPMS and ECM system, and is probably essential to claim to offer a real ECM framework. Which in modern mixed-up enterprises is essential to enable maximum penetration and reuse of the technology. Unfortunately I don’t see any real standards that can achieve this - JSR170 doesn’t provide enough reach.

If/when I manage a BPMS/ECM product, I’ll try and make sure this is on the roadmap. Maybe you’ll hold me to that!

Nice post for getting the braincells working over the weekend!

Cheers
Phil