Studio Roles

Question

I am new to BPM and I have not found a way to import roles from LDAP or other provisioning system into my Studio project. I see configuration for the server, but it appears there is a gap if the roles are not available to me at development time vs. deployment.
If someone could point me in the right direction I would really appreciate it

Answer 1

Hi SJackson,
There are two distinct role concepts in BPM. In Studio, the process that is defined uses abstract roles - which, if done properly, will rarely equal what you have in LDAP as a role. For example, let's say you have a business process for Submitting Expense Reports. To make it simple, you have 3 basic steps - 1. Submit Expense Report 2. Review Expense Report 3. Reimburse Expenses
In most companies, a CEO, Developer, and a Marketing Assistant could all Submit expenses but their organizational roles are all different with respect to their daily responsibilities. For BPM Studio, the role would be more abstract such as Expense Submitter, Expense Approver, and Expense Payer. As you can see, these are abstract roles that can be applied across different companies but more importantly, it can be used within the same company across different departments or business units.
At deployment time, you will relate your Abstract Studio roles with your Organization Roles which may or may not be exactly as your LDAP roles still. Again, it may be for the same issue described above where the activity spans so many roles, there is not one Organization role that is kept in your LDAP.
All of that said, what might be closer to LDAP roles and BPM Roles are BPM Groups. A BPM Group is a collection of BPM roles (and other groups) that can be assigned a Participant. This might describe a person's job function or part of a job function more clearly than BPM roles. For example, a Marketing Assistant could be part of a Group called Tradeshow Manager which contains the Expense Submitter role. Similarly the CEO could be part of a Group called CEO that contains the "Tradeshow Manager" group (which inherits the Expense Submitter role and potentially others.
Hopefully that sheds more light on the usage of Roles/Groups and their relationship to LDAP.