Brian, What you are really describing is a Request Management solution.
What you want to do is put together requestable offerings for a customer that consist of one or more steps that interact with one or more solutions. Those solutions in your case are currently other AR System forms, but they could in fact be other products. You want to define a flow of interaction where some things are in parallel and others are serial. Data from one may pass to another. Questions are asked of the requester and they are passed into the right step of the process. All the work is really done by the other processes or solutions but you need something to coordinate the asking and the flow of operations. The Service Request Management (SRM) solution from BMC is just this type of solution. It incorporates all of the support for performing the type of operation you are looking at. Atrium Orchestrator is a second workflow technology that BMC offers for orchestrating machine interactions or people to machine interactions. If, rather than trying to orchestrate across several high level processes to coordinate an activity, what you needed to do was to go to machine x and make a setting then to machine y and install something and then machine z and do something else. AO would be a good technology and a good solution to put together that flow. Then, you may want to call that AO script to do that lower level, machine flow from one of the steps you are orchestrating at the SRM level. I encourage you to take a look at the SRM solution. It is already fully integrated with all of the out of the box applications BMC supplies and it can be trivially configured to interact with any additional forms you have constructed. You can build whatever requestable offering flows you want. This is the next major application that I think all customers will need. It is the second anchor of a new and improved approach to Business Service Management and the restructuring of IT. (the first anchor is the CMDB by the way). Good luck with your journey. It is headed in the right direction. Doug Mueller ________________________________ From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Brien Dieterle Sent: Friday, March 05, 2010 10:44 AM To: [email protected] Subject: orchestration with AR System ** We have AR System, alone, with a lot of custom forms. Trying to create higher-level workflows that tie these forms together (such as an employee boarding process) is proving to be a daunting task. Do we need Atrium Orchestrator to achieve this in a supportable manner? This post<http://communities.bmc.com/communities/message/93790#93790> seems to suggest a resounding "YES". AO is really intended to automate and accelerate the execution of broader IT services that are typically performed through a series of actions across these purpose-built applications. If so, can we acquire *just* this AO component or do we need the other pieces like Atrium CMDB, etc. What are the alternatives to doing orchestration, in general? That is, how would you go about defining these higher-level services that encompass multiple forms within an AR System? My first guess is you could just make a web page describing the higher-level process with a bunch of links to each individual form, and let a human be the orchestrator. In other words, not bother? :-) Another way (which I've tried) is to make a "wrapper" form that defines the process and attempts to orchestrate the child-forms through a complex series of filters and extra fields on both the wrapper form the and child forms. Not very understandable or flexible. Now I am looking at Orchestrator which seems to be a monster of a product but sounds like it is the correct one, but is it overkill? Thanks for any suggestions! Brien _Platinum Sponsor: [email protected] ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are"_ _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org attend wwrug10 www.wwrug.com ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are"
