Hi,

Thanks for this great article that summarizes part of the issue of integrating Human Workflow in BPEL processes.
At Intalio, we have decided to implement BPEL4People without extending the BPEL 2.0 spec. Our implementation is based on a 5 year experience of integrating human users within business processes.
The Intalio|Workflow component is based on XForms and a set of processes deployed as BPEL 2.0 code on the Intalio|Server (aka PXE). The nice thing is that the forms representing the tasks are edited graphically through a WYSISWYG editor integrated in Intalio|Designer, an eclipse based application.
It leads me to another comment, having BPEL supporting human interaction is one side of the problem. The other side is focused on the business side of the process design. It is important to have a visual representation of Human interactions within a process. Intalio|Designer has adopted the BPMN specification to describe business processes but BPMN does not yet fully support 'Human task' as a first class citizen.

One last comment is that Intalio|Workflow Community Edition comes for free as well as the entire product ;). Check out our community website to become a member of our community.

Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), one of the key technologies for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), has become the accepted mechanism for defining and executing business processes in a common vendor-neutral way. Companies ranging from Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and BEA to smaller organizations such as Fuego and Lombardi have committed to BPEL as a building block for SOA. BPEL, which has been designed specifically for defining business processes, supports typical interactions such as synchronous and asynchronous operation invocation, sequential and parallel flows, message correlations, fault and compensation handlers and activities triggered by events. Business processes often require human interactions as well.

Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), one of the key technologies for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), has become the accepted mechanism for defining and executing business processes in a common vendor-neutral way. Companies ranging from Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and BEA to smaller organizations such as Fuego and Lombardi have committed to BPEL as a building block for SOA. BPEL, which has been designed specifically for defining business processes, supports typical interactions such as synchronous and asynchronous operation invocation, sequential and parallel flows, message correlations, fault and compensation handlers and activities triggered by events. Business processes often require human interactions as well.

Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), one of the key technologies for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), has become the accepted mechanism for defining and executing business processes in a common vendor-neutral way. Companies ranging from Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and BEA to smaller organizations such as Fuego and Lombardi have committed to BPEL as a building block for SOA. BPEL, which has been designed specifically for defining business processes, supports typical interactions such as synchronous and asynchronous operation invocation, sequential and parallel flows, message correlations, fault and compensation handlers and activities triggered by events. Business processes often require human interactions as well.