Updated: December 2006

Oracle has announced product obsolescence for Oracle Workflow. It's functional replacement is Oracle BPEL Process Manager ¹, which provides a standard mechanism of creating both human-centric and process-centric workflows.

Support Information

Customers with a current support contract can view the current desupport notice via Oracle Metalink under "Certify & Availability" ==> "1. View Certifications by Product" ==> "Desupport Advisories and Notices" ==> "Cooperative Applications Dessuport Notices", or under Doc ID 391546.1 ².

Some key points from the desupport notice:

• Error Correction Support (ECS) ends on 11-SEP-2007.
  
  
• The final version will be 2.6.x.
  
  
• The desupport applies to all platforms.
  
  
• Oracle Workflow Client and Oracle Workflow Server will not be included in Oracle Database Editions 11g and above.
  
  
• Oracle Workflow will only be included in Oracle E-Business Suite releases.
  
• Existing Oracle Workflow customers continue to receive error correction support up until the same date that error correction support ends for product bundle purchased which include Oracle Workflow. For example, Oracle Database 10gR2 customers using Oracle Workflow will receive error correction support for Oracle Workflow until error correction supports ends for Oracle Database 10gR2.

Migrating to Oracle BPEL Process Manager

The previous Oracle Workflow statement of direction ³ published in January 2006 indicated that new development by customers of human-centric workflow should be bdone with Oracle BPEL Process Manager. In addition, Oracle are now recommending that customers who have Oracle Workflow workflows in development or production that they plan to continue to enhance in the future should begin re-implementing those in BPEL. This will enable upward compatibility with future Oracle Application Server platform releases and provide access to the most current development stack and feature set available.

An Oracle White Paper outlining the migration is available.

While there will be some development costs associated with the migration of existing processes from Oracle Workflow to Oracle BPEL Process Manager, it is important to note that there are significant benefits. In addition to being a modern Oracle product with a long support roadmap, BPEL is a well accepted industry standard, supported by a wide array of vendors and end-user customers and partners.

¹   http://oracle.com/technology/bpel
²   http://metalink.oracle.com/metalink/plsql/ml2_documents.showDocument?p_database_id=NOT&p_id=391546.1
³   http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/ias/workflow/workflow_sod.html