[jbpm-dev] jBPM 5 User Administration

[Brad Davis]

Hey Kris,
All of the above.  I was hoping for a contact at the very least, so thanks for reaching out.  

>From an Authentication perspective, I imagine this will be plugable to JAAS; are we thinking about taking the same approach that JON uses, and user information and group management through jBPM?  If we use this approach, we could duel authenticate against the jBPM table for the user name to ensure that they have been entered into the jBPM system and the user's authentication system of choice.  To avoid user re-entry, perhaps in jBPM's administration console, we can have an "import-users" feature, which could query the authentication system [such as LDAP] and list all users who are not part of the system.  This obviously would have to be plugable.

jBPM 3 was quite limited to information that could be stored associated with a User.  I was hoping we could normalize the data structure a bit to make that more flexible.  As I have stated in previous comments to the group, I think we should move away from an "email" only notification, and should instead put into place a User Notification Framework.  If we normalize out the User table from the Communications table, we could add a Communication Type Column, and IsPrimaryFlag setting.  When a User Notification Node is hit, we could then notify the user using either a distinctly configured method, and if not configured, we would use the user's primary notification from the system.  

User
==============
ID
....

Communication
==============
ID
User_ID
Communication_Type_ID
IsPrimaryFlag

Communication Type
==================
ID
Name


Notification Framework, I imagine, would be an event driven model.  This way, users could plug in their own "handlers" to subscribe to a certain type of notification, so they could handle custom communication types.  We would ship the EmailNotificationHandler OOTB.  Another interesting NotificationHandler to ship would be one for Jabber; Smack is a great API for Jabber communication.  It would give us quite a bit; Google Chat runs on IM in addition to a number of organizations that use this internally.  Also, going into a client site for sales, having the system IM me in the middle of the presentation would have a *heavy* effect.  

User Management is also heavily tied to metrics and reporting.  A lot of our clients are looking for reporting in the new system, particularly around the user performance [what is their throughput over a given period? What are they spending most of their time on? These kinds of things].  I noticed in the initial design, support for BAM, but I wanted to check and see if this reporting interface was going to have web-UI setup and configuration of reports, and what reports we were thinking to include OOTB. 

Thanks!
Brad











-----Original Message-----
From: Kris Verlaenen [mailto:kverlaen at redhat.com] 
Sent: Thursday, September 02, 2010 10:23 AM
To: Brad Davis
Cc: jbpm-dev at lists.jboss.org
Subject: Re: [jbpm-dev] jBPM 5 User Administration

Brad,

You mean for human tasks (user / group management)?  Or for 
authentication / authorization (who is who and is allowed to do what?) 
of the engine, or the web tooling? Or all of the above?  Suggestions on 
what can be improved are always welcome ;)

Kris

Brad Davis wrote:
>
> Have we yet considered the user administration in jBPM 5?  I am 
> wondering what we are going to change between 3 and 5. 
>
>  
>
> I have a couple of suggestions in this regards.
>
>  
>
> Cheers,
>
> Brad Davis
>
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