Converting a JBPM BPM to Activiti

[dancingfighterg]

Hello, we are in the process of starting our project around converting all our JBPM driven workflows to Activiti. I wanted to know at a high level the following:

-What our main roadblocks we can expect when doing this
-What tools in the Activiti engine will replace or optimize the functionality that is present in JBPM
-What is the general stradegy that should be applied when making the conversion

Thanks for anyone who can help

[jbarrez]

Depends on the version of jBPM. jBPM 6 is BPMN 2.0, so conversion should be easier than migration from jBPM 3 or 4.
If it's jBPM 3/4 … then it'l be quiet a bit of work (I tried once to write such a tool… and gave up quickly). However, the number of constructs in jBPM 3/4 is more limited than activiti. Migration of data is the real hard thing i believe.

As far as i know, there is no generic tool to convert the process definitions.

[dancingfighterg]

Thanks for the response jbarrez. I've asked my developers to find the version of the jbpm engine that we are using. Once I get this information if you can tell me the following as it relates to the engine that would be great:

-What our main roadblocks we can expect when doing this
-What tools in the Activiti engine will replace or optimize the functionality that is present in JBPM
-What is the general stradegy that should be applied when making the conversion

[jbarrez]

That is a very generic question … and the problem is that it really depends on your use case, and what you are using in jBPM.
I dont see major roadbloack, i just think it's a lot of work to get exactly right (of course, it depends on what you use …). Also, I'm not the right person to make a comparison between jbpm and activiti … im a bit biased you see.

[dancingfighterg]

Hey Jbarrez, we are currently on version JBPM 3.3.1.  Overall our workflows do transformation of documents to add signatures and to combine documents together to build one document using custom templates. As for bias I am too so no worries. We are moving all our workflows to Activiti so I'm just overall looking to come up some timings on how it will take to get this migration done. Also, trying to get some base knowledge on the tools that Activiti uses to do what we do now.

[dancingfighterg]

I was looking at this document to get some overall reference on the lift to migrate from JBPM 3

http://www.bpm-guide.de/2012/12/14/migrating-from-jbpm-to-activiti/