On day 3 of Impact 2008, I focused quite a bit on networking but I did attend 2 sessions. 

Advanced Business Process Management Integration Techniques presentation focused on how to use WebSphere Business modeler to model a business process that partly runs to FileNet to manage documents and partly runs in WebSphere Process Server. The presentation used a lot of screenshots and the speaker went through the slides quickly leaving very little time to digest what was going on. My take away from the session can be summarized as follows:

• The integration between FileNet and process server is at primitive level, which is expected given that IBM only recently bought FileNet

• In WBM 6.1, you can export the process as XPDL format, a format recognized by FileNet

• The integration between process server and FileNet is not true integration. In other words, they don't work as one product behind the scene. FileNet exposes its process as a web service, which the process server has to invoke

• FileNet has its own framework to generate events, which are not CEI/CBE compliant events. However, WPS 6.1 comes with a FileNet event adapter, which can convert FileNet event into CBE event and log them in the events database for monitor to pickup

• The most interesting part of the example was passing attachments (documents to be stored in FileNet) between WPS and FileNet. The speaker suggested that one way was to use JAX-RPC handler, which raised several questions in my mind (none of them discussed in the presentation)
• JAX-RPC handler is part of JAX-RPC specification but from development and tooling perspective, was it always supported? In other words, did WebSphere Integration Developer provide tooling to configure and develop handlers in versions prior to 6.1? If yes, are there scenarios when it makes sense to use handlers as opposed to mediations given that handlers are lighter than mediations
• Is there any way to make attachments (or binary data) part of the BO that flows through a process? Is it a good design decision to do so? Probably not but then what is the best way to move documents through the business process whether FileNet is used or not? I am going to find answers to all these questions

The second session was [supposed to be] about using bindings in WebSphere ESB. The abstract talked about using different messaging bindings. In other words, the session was going to be about how messaging systems can connect to SCA components running in ESB, what happens to the data, how message is represented as objects etc. but the speaker announced at the start of the presentation that he was only going to talk about MQ bindings. This limited scope provided very little value. Also, during the discussion the speaker merely showed the screenshots of WID where you would go to configure bindings and set various properties. Anyone who opens WID can see those screens. The real value would have been to discuss how to set binding properties, when to select what value for the properties, when to use default selectors and binders vs. when to create custom ones. The theme of the discussion was 'here is where you configure things' as opposed to 'here is why and how to do things.'

Before the end of the day I collected some information on IBM partner program and met some friends I used to work with 5 years ago. Fortunately I didn't eat lunch at the conference so I don't have anything to rant about the food.