In my previous job (banking) we ware using Appian for all our workflows. It was a strange beast of a Java UI application with a k/kdb core and database. It's U

In my previous job (banking) we ware using Appian for all our workflows. It was a strange beast of a Java UI application with a k/kdb core and database. It's UI was really good, much better than Activiti and similar BPM systems; you could create a rather complex workflow with almost no code, just by creating yout BPMN flow through the built-in editor. Also, the editor and the rules system was builtin on the web UI so you didn't have too use external, eclips-ish tools unless you wanted to write custom BPMN nodes, mainly for integration with external systems. Errors and retries were handled through BPMN. The main problem was the K core: Because nobody knew how to write K we relied on the Java API for access to the kdb database (actually messing with the kdb directly was not even supported by Appian thus even if somebody was willing to learn the bank wouldn't let him mess with the kdbs), which, because of the restrictions it had resulted to having to manually edit a couple of hundred live process instances to change a task assignee or skip a non working custom node... Also because kdbs are stored in memory we needed a very big amount of RAM on the server; which was growing larger proportionally with the ptocess instances. Even with these shortcomings, I still think that it was a good product, much better than other workflow solutions like Activiti or jbpm or Alfresco. One last thing: Appian was way too expensive; don't consider it if you are not a bank...