In June 2007, Active Endpoints, Adobe, BEA, IBM, Oracle and SAP published the BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask specifications as a follow-up to the whitepaper, describing how human interaction in BPEL processes can be performed.

Problem Definition & Motivation: Web services have become widely accepted as the de facto standard for distributed business applications. BPEL, that formally describes processes, permits orchestration of web services. While external activities within BPEL correspond to web services, the obvious business activity of a human interaction within a process is not covered by.

Objectives: Within the context of a business process BPEL4People

• supports role based interaction of people
• provides means of assigning users to generic human roles
• takes care to delegate ownership of a task to a person only
• supports scenario as:

1. four eyes scenario
2. nomination
3. escalation
4. chained execution

by extending BPEL with additional independent syntax and semantic.

WS-HumanTask introduces the definition of human tasks and notifications, including their properties, behavior and a set of operations used to manipulate human tasks. A coordination protocol is introduced in order to control autonomy and life cycle of service-enabled human tasks in an interoperable manner.

BPEL4People introduces a WS-BPEL extension to address human interactions in WS-BPEL as a first-class citizen. It defines a new type of basic activity which uses human tasks as an implementation, and allows specifying tasks local to a process or use tasks defined outside of the process definition. This extension is based on the WS-HumanTask specification. Find out more information and further links at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BPEL4People