Camunda Platform 7 Community Edition is an open-source workflow and decision automation platform that allows developers to create, deploy, and manage business processes and decisions in a simple and efficient way. It is designed to help organizations automate their workflows and improve their operational efficiency.

We asked Asko Soukka, Software Architect and “Camunda Champion” working at University of Jyväskylä, to share how they have been applying open source Camunda Platform 7 Community Edition for different use cases. University of Jyväskylä is not a customer of or affiliated in any other way with Vuono Group. This post has been shared for the public good only.

Open source as the core of automation capability

The role of Digital Services at University of Jyväskylä includes being at the forefront of digital transformation and process automation. For us, choosing open source software is not only about the possible cost savings, but also about developing a long-term capability for continuous development and innovation with minimal friction.

One of such choices has been our decision to use BPMN and DMN standards with Camunda Desktop Modeler and Camunda Platform 7 Community Edition as the core of our digital transformation solutions. This post provides an overview of the broad range of use cases in which we have been able to leverage the open source process automation capabilities.

Camunda Modeler for documentation and design

We didn’t choose Camunda Platform by accident. Already years before our first fully digitized and automated process, we were looking for a viable option for the experts on our staff to participate in the documentation and development of various processes at our university.

At first, we chose BPMN for its simplicity. Then, we chose Camunda Modeler for its ease of use and open source license. The free license allowed for immediate workstation distribution. However, back then, it was merely a bonus that the processes modeled with the modeler could also be redesigned for automated execution.

Vasara for form-driven business process automation

In early 2020, we started developing a custom “low-codeish” automation platform called Vasara on top of Camunda and various other open-source components. Since then, Vasara has become the main workhorse of our digital transformation and form-driven process automation for those business processes without an existing digital platform. For both staff and students. The platform itself continues to be developed to match the requirements of upcoming cases.

Feature-wise, Vasara provides process deployment and user task form building tools, as well as a simple task list application. It has been built on top of Hasura GraphQL Engine-powered unified GraphQL API for business data and Camunda process data, including all process-related actions. For integration and automation, we rely on Camunda’s external task pattern and the technology that best fits the purpose. As a low barrier integration option, we support on-premises Robocorp RCC toolchain with both “pro code” and “low code” bots.

**Figure 1:** Vasara implements its own user task form builder.

**Figure 2:** Vasara task list renders user task forms built with its own form builder.

Camunda as microservice orchestrator

Our development teams have over 10 years of experience in microservice architecture. Quite obviously, we’ve been curious how using BPMN would bring implicit documentation, better visibility, and more flexibility into our microservice pipelines.

This year, we have been renewing our university’s custom video publishing service into a more capable and flexible video processing platform to support both teaching and research use cases. Our Camunda experience has been one of the core enablers for this renewal. In our new implementation, our users’ videos get encoded, transcoded, analyzed, transcribed, etc., using BPMN modeled processes, Camunda-driven microservice orchestration using Nomad as the eventual job scheduler.

**Figure 3:** Camunda orchestrating video transcoding microservices

BPMN for implementing complex end user epics

Many user stories start simple. For example, “A user self-registers into a course”. Yet the final version could be more like this: “A new user, after being digitally verified as an authentic person, creates a new user account. After forgetting and resetting their password, they finally log into the system, find the course, complete the payment for the registration, and are eventually enrolled into the course.” This is no longer just a story but a huge epic, and it’s really hard to manage with all its exceptions by “just coding it”.

That’s why we’ve recently been using BPMN and Camunda to design and implement complex long-running user story epics on our continuous learning registration portal, as well as our renewed video publishing platform. In our experience, BPMN-delegated “end-user wizards” perform well enough for real-time user routing. However, they are priceless for managing asynchronous continuation, where user destination depends on the results of interaction with external services.

**Figure 4:** JYU continuous learning portal users are guided through their registration processes with the gentle power of BPMN.

Camunda for mobile participation management

Finally, we are currently introducing Camunda-driven BPMN as a solution for managing long-term user participation in a smartphone-based citizen research. “Muuttolintujen kevät” mobile app, a collaboration between the University of Jyväskylä, CSC, and Yle, is a Finnish citizen research application for tracking the travel of migratory birds. In the current iteration, the use of the app is mostly independent of Camunda, but each participant already gets registered through their own long-term Camunda process.

**Figure 5:** Each “Muuttolintujen kevät” participant is registered once using a Camunda driven process.

Conclusion

In conclusion, choosing an open source process automation platform has been instrumental in building automation solutions at Digital Services of the University of Jyväskylä. It has enabled us to develop the required solutions while establishing a long-term capability for continuous development and innovation with minimal friction. And we are not going to stop our innovation here. For example, we’ve been researching into building first class BPMN support into our favorite open source enterprise CMS, Plone 6. We are also actively looking into possible open source solutions around Zeebe, the almost open process engine for Camunda Platform 8.

Asko Soukka

Software Architect, “Camunda Champion”
Digital Services, University of Jyväskylä

For Camunda-related topics, it is recommended to contact the author through the official Camunda Community communication channels.

Camunda open source process automation capabilities and real-life use cases