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Contributed on April 21, 2016

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On the Radar: BP3 Global

BP3 Global provides services and toolkits that support organisations developing process applications. Its flagship Brazos UI product leverages IBM Business Process Manager, building upon and enhancing Coach View controls available in its out-of-the-box UI designer; but it also produces a tool for open source BPM engines (Brazos Open).

Who?

BP3 Global, Inc. is a specialist BPM and decision management consulting services and product provider based in Austin TX, and with offices in London, UK.

What does it do?

BP3 provides a range of BPM-related products and services, grouped into three families:

• BP Solutions production tools and toolkits (including Brazos UI Toolkit – the main focus of this report).
• BP Labs subscription-based packages, with options that go beyond typical support and into the realms of packaged consultancy with tool support.
• BP Services: tailored implementation services to customers’ requirements.

In addition to its established BPM practice BP3 also has a growing decision management practice, focused specifically on implementation of IBM’s Operational Decision Management technology, owing to its 2014 acquisition of specialist consulting services provider Modexe.

BP Solutions

Brazos UI Toolkit

Brazos is a user interface design toolkit for process application development. It leverages the APIs and patterns from IBM Business Process Manager’s Coach View framework, combined with open source libraries such as the Bootstrap web front-end development framework, Google’s AngularJS JavaScript framework for dynamic views, JQuery (to handle data exchange, provided by IBM BPM’s own integrations), and AJAX services (for large data sets).

The resulting toolkit enhances developer and user experience (compared with the out-of-the-box capabilities afforded by IBM’s standard Coach NG process application development tool), particularly in two areas: firstly, in support for mobile – where Brazos is able to provide a responsive environment, scaling applications across multiple screen sizes from a single code base and exploiting native browser functionality for common interface elements wherever possible; and secondly, in conformance to WCAG 2.0 Level A Guidelines on support for people with disabilities.

The Brazos UI Toolkit also includes a responsive chart library (Brazos Charts), which includes seven base charts with numerous configuration options (all able to be populated using AJAX services).

BP3 describes Brazos as “the toolkit it wishes IBM had developed”, basing it on its consultants’ experience building process applications and developing the company’s BPM methodology in their own projects. BP3 tests Brazos with beta versions of IBM BPM prior to general availability so it can be “upgrade-ready” when new versions of IBM BPM are released.

The toolkit is offered in both Lite and Enterprise editions, both of which ship with a Brazos Examples process app, user guide, and interactive Brazos CSS Generator built using Brazos Coach Views. Both are also fully compatible with Brazos Portal (see below):

• Brazos Lite is free to all users who register with BP3 using a company email address and accept the End User License Agreement. It’s a ‘limited capability’ version of Brazos, shorn of certain Brazos controls and configuration options (see below). Support is limited to bug reporting only. BP3 provides a seamless upgrade path from Lite to Enterprise (customers need only install the Enterprise snapshot and update dependencies).
• Brazos Enterprise is available to customers and partners who have paid support subscriptions to BP3. The company offers normal business hours support, 24/7 support options, and per-seat or enterprise bundlingBuilding on Brazos Lite, the Enterprise edition includes access to additional controls and configurations, namely: advanced table control (providing connection to data sources of any size, supporting features such as row selection, row addition, row deletion, pagination, sorting, filtering, inline editing, and CSV export), advanced file attach (works with internal BPM document repository or external ECM repositories), mobile signature pad, map, progress bar, bubble chart, and an advanced feature set for the Text Area control. Enterprise customers also benefit from internationalisation / localisation; more frequent releases (typically every 4-6 weeks for public releases, more frequent for urgent issues), together access to BP3’s archives of earlier versions of the product; and SLA-driven entitlements including support from BP3’s Brazos engineering team (both a 24/7 portal, and Brazos engineers in three time zones covering customer queries 24 hours a day), prioritised bug fixes and enhancements requests, and sight of the Brazos UI development roadmap.

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