Setting up the development environment (Simple)

Financial services are organizations or business houses that are associated with money management, such as investment banks or commercial banks, insurance companies, mortgaging and stock brokerage firms. Some of the major concerns and challenges that these financial services face revolve around security, customer satisfaction, process management, business process administration, partner and customer relationship management, and so on. We will look at some of these challenges from a business point of view.

• Security: Security is a major challenge in financial services that involves keeping customers' money safe and secured. It is necessary to ensure transactional security while customers use their credit cards, debit cards, or do online banking over the Web or through wireless mobile devices.

• Customer satisfaction: Customer satisfaction is also a key factor for financial services. Most banks provide services such as personal loans, home loans, commercial loans, gold loans, mortgage loans, and wealth management consultation. The turnaround period from applying for a loan to getting cash in hand has to be kept as short as possible, to ensure maximum customer satisfaction.

• Profit margins: Profit margins are very thin, but are a major requirement for the survival and growth of these organizations. Most often, they operate with their own funds. Sometimes they might even borrow money from other lenders or banks at a lower rate of interest and give the same money to their customers at a higher rate of interest.

• Payment processing: Payments can happen over the Web, through mobile devices, using credit/debit cards, and so on. They also need to ensure that transactions are authentic and non-fraudulent by sending notifications on debiting/crediting or duplicate billing in an account, and by escalating and blocking an account when illegal access attempts are made.

• Follow regulatory and compliance requirements: Every country has its own local and international trade laws that financial services need to follow. They also need to preserve documents and records for a certain period of time.

Getting ready

Before proceeding further, we need to set up our development environment. For that, we need to have a desktop machine or a laptop with the Windows or Linux operating system installed. It is preferable to have a 64-bit operating system with more than 4-GB RAM. Alternatively, if you have access, you can use an Oracle SOA BPM WebCenter pre-installed virtual machine, or you can configure one yourself.

The full list of software packages required is as follows:

• Oracle Database, Oracle JDK, Oracle JDeveloper IDE, and Oracle SQL Developer

• Oracle Repository Creation Utility (RCU) and Oracle WebLogic Server

• Oracle SOA Suite (includes BPM)

• Oracle WebCenter Spaces (optional) and Oracle WebCenter Content (optional)

• SOA and BPM extensions for JDeveloper

Note

The demos and examples used in this book are developed on the Fedora 17 Linux operating system (64-bit) having 12-GB RAM and 6-core processor with Oracle Database 11g Release 1 installed on it, and running the following software packages:

• Oracle JDK (1.6.0_30)

• Oracle RCU (11.1.1.6.0)

• Oracle WebLogic Server 11g Release 1 (10.3.6)

• Oracle SOA Suite 11g Release 1 PS5 (11.1.1.6.0) that includes BPM as well

• Oracle WebCenter Spaces 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.6.0) configured with BPM Process Spaces

• Oracle WebCenter Content 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.6.0)

• Oracle Service Bus PS5 (11.1.1.6.0)

How to do it…

In this recipe, we will configure a WebLogic domain to include Oracle WebCenter Portal with BPM Process Spaces, so that we can use WebCenter Portal to access BPM process-related process tasks and monitor the process. The commands that we run in this recipe use a system name of james on a Linux-based operating system.

1. Launch the terminal and run the following command:

   cd /home/james/Oracle/Middleware/Oracle_SOA1/common/bin
   [james@james bin]$ ./config.sh

   This will launch the domain configuration wizard. Select the option to create a new Domain.

2. Select Oracle WebCenter Spaces, Oracle BPM Suite for developers, Oracle SOA Suite for developers, Oracle Universal Content Management, Oracle BAM, and Oracle Enterprise Manager. Once you have done that, click on Next.

   

3. Select all the component schemas and give the corresponding DBMS/ service names, database port numbers, and schema passwords. Once you have done that, click on Next.

   

4. Create a domain with the name fmw_domain, and then click on Finish.

5. Once again launch the domain creation wizard, and this time extend fmw_domain and patch it up with the oracle.bpm.spaces_template_11.1.1.jar template to enable BPM Process Spaces within WebCenter.

   

6. Edit process-portal-install.properties in the /home/james/Oracle/Middleware/Oracle_SOA1/bpm/process_spaces folder, and run the Ant script as shown in following command:

   /home/james/Oracle/Middleware/modules/org.apache.ant_1.7.1/bin/ant -f install.xml

7. Log in to Enterprise Manager (http://localhost:7001/em) and configure Content Server with its default intradoc server port, 4444, and a UCM connection in WebCenter.

   

8. Restart all the Managed Servers, Admin Server, WebCenter, Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), and the Content Server.

Note

Please change the commands used in this recipe according to your system name and installation folders.

How it works…

Log in to WebCenter Portal at http://localhost:8888/webcenter and ensure that the BPM Process Spaces group space is working, and that we are able to access documents in the content repository. Also, this can be a good time to start working on creating a WebCenter Portal template and WebCenter Portal navigation.

There's more…

This book showcases a home loan use case from build to deployment and from run to manage. It would also be interesting to know that Oracle has process accelerators—a prebuilt, "ready to deploy" BPM process that meets industry standards. These process accelerators not only use Oracle BPM, but other Oracle products as well, depending on the business requirements. There are two types of process accelerators:

• Horizontal process accelerators: These are process accelerators that can be re-used across any industry where they help streamline business processes. Some examples include travel request management, document routing and approval, internal service requests, and so on.

• Industry process accelerators: These are specifically designed for a particular industry. Examples include Public Sector Incident Reporting, Financial Services Loan Origination Process, and so on. Some of these accelerators are purely BPM based, and some integrate with other Oracle applications as well, depending on the business requirements.