Today, we are interviewing Kynao. You may have meet him on the forum where he participates often and shares his discoveries or helps other members
Please tell us a bit about yourself.
I worked as an administrator but especially as a developer on the Lotus Domino platform, at first as employee on subcontracting missions for major accounts, then in an IT services & software engineering company, and finally as an independent consultant on information and communication technologies. I stopped my business activities in the IT domain and replaced them with another activity sector offering me far more freedom, especially in terms of spare time allowing me to approach products, technologies and projects to which I attach a particular importance.
In terms of products, BPM solutions, workflow, job and rules engines retain my attention these days. The PHP platform is the technology I operate under while having the objective to combine it with some Java resources.
What have you done with Bonita Open Solution, or what kind of projects have you used BOS for?
Nothing yet at this point so no other choice than talking about what I focus on. Developing collaboration and coordination solutions is the background I come from. My plan is still to offer productivity and event management solutions but dedicated to the largest number, so public projects in the shape of micro web solutions, individually exploitable or aggregated, and likely to be articulated between various web sites. We still don’t see enough of this (there’s very little or it’s very focused on common uses like comments/forum posts), and it would represent a modest contribution towards making the web a little more distributed than it is already and with a little more coordinated participation.
Beyond this objective, I plan first to build a very particular betting exchange web site which it is impossible for me to realize without a BPM tool such as Bonita; and secondly, activist projects; a resource-based economy system being one of them I can mention without exceeding the frame of the interview by a description which would be everything except news in brief! It’s easy to find more about it through a web search.
Which version of BOS did you start with and what are you using now?
Bonita has been in my bookmarks as a resource to watch but I didn’t have a closer interest into it before the 5.1 release. Bonita is in my top list as the best adapted BPM solution for what I’m looking for but the choice is not yet definitive, the reason why I didn’t produce any project with it yet. The API ease of use is the last decisive point i have to validate, Bonita 6 is supposed to be an answer on this side.
Name 3 features of BOS that you really like.
See this as logical or not but the 3 features I like the most are the ones I’m looking at for some improvements 
, these are connectors, the API and Groovy.
Connectors are not over complicated to create and the added value in terms of interoperability with the Java platform and products is great (Drools is among the first things always coming to my mind here), the API allows to interact with processes in different modes and so not only the REST one as we used to see with competitors, and the use of a quite simple language running on the JVM is much appreciated even if the performance of this one is a little subject of worry
Why did you choose BOS?
BPMN2 standard adoption, documentation, public connectors, general performance, repository and an entry level with a useful free edition that is not so limited that we have no other choice than choosing nearly from the beginning the entrerprise or premium
editions to have something usable were the first arguments of preselection.
On a second level, key factor is that Bonita is still both the most mature and simple to use plus the fact I can have training if needed, furthermore in my first language due to my location; an argument also important for support after solutions deployments. Finally, the first subscription pack pricing does not have a very different order of magnitude than alternatives solutions.
What do you find useful or helpful about the Bonita community?
Again, the connectors repository even if it deserves to be improved. For the rest, the potential remains to be revealed as the BPM approach in general still lacks democratisation. For the Bonita community, I see the connector repository as a good beginning to be complemented by additional initiatives like a process central area where we could find workflow patterns and typical use cases process templates (for example purchase request, vacation leave request, help desk and so on) as part of work produced by Bonitasoft from time to time. I saw some of them in the connector repository but I would see them as decoupled areas, both being usable directly from Bonita Studio. This process central area would also be accessible by the community and new comers as an on-line participation space where processes could be elaborated through the web browser.
