Alfresco has launched a preview of the Activiti Business Process Management (BPM) workflow engine integrated with its ECM platform.

The Activiti integration extends Alfresco’s workflow features by providing developers more flexibility and integration capabilities for process flows between Alfresco and other business applications. The integration is being offered through an update to Alfresco Community, version 3.4.e and is available for immediate download.

“The replacement of jBPM with Activiti in Alfresco is just the beginning. It's the start of a seamless integrated environment that combines Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Adaptive Case Management (ACM) and Business Process Management (BPM)," said Tom Baeyens, Activiti Project Lead.

"Moving forward, our new case management vision will focus on taking BPM out of its niche and opening it up to a much wider audience, fostering an environment for even greater innovation.”

Activiti is a lightweight workflow and Business Process Management (BPM) Platform targeted at business people, developers and system admins.

This preview release will enable early adopters to compare the existing jBPM workflow with the Activiti BPM environment while at the same time start experimenting with the integration into other tools to create different types of workflow applications.

The production ready version of this integration will be delivered in the next major release of Alfresco Enterprise later this year in Q4 2011.