Bizagi is one of the leading BPM platforms for modeling and automating business processes. It is powerful and efficient for defining workflows, rules, tasks, approvals, and SLAs. However, processes are not limited to moving tasks between users; they also generate, receive, and access documents such as contracts, case files, certificates, invoices, forms, and more.
Although Bizagi allows organizations to work with documents within their processes, it is not designed to manage the entire document lifecycle. Capabilities such as version control, document classification, advanced search, expiration management, retention policies, traceability, and document sharing across different processes and applications belong to the domain of a document management system or ECM software.
There is another reason to avoid turning Bizagi into your document repository, and it usually becomes apparent over time. Documents eventually stop belonging exclusively to the process that created them and begin to be accessed from other processes, portals, mobile applications, ERPs, or CRMs. If documents remain stored within the BPM, Bizagi eventually takes on responsibilities for which it was not designed. A document management system avoids this dependency, turns documents into shared corporate assets, and reduces the cost of evolving the architecture as new applications are introduced.
Once the architectural decision has been made to use a document management system for Bizagi, a second question arises, particularly relevant for IT teams: how can you integrate the document management system with Bizagi without embarking on a complex custom development project that is difficult to maintain?
Once you have decided that Bizagi will work alongside ECM software, the next question is usually: how much effort will the integration require?
In reality, compatibility is rarely the problem. Most modern document management systems provide REST APIs and standard authentication mechanisms, so connecting both systems is technically possible. The difference when choosing a document management system for Bizagi lies in the amount of work required to build and maintain that integration.
When an organization decides to integrate a document management system with Bizagi through custom development, simply exchanging information between both systems is usually not enough. It is also necessary to develop the user experience that people will use within the process.
For example, it is common to have to implement functionality such as:
In other words, the effort does not consist solely of consuming an API: you also have to develop and maintain a document management interface within Bizagi.
It is true that Bizagi provides connectors for certain applications through its Marketplace, but these only cover certain scenarios and technologies.
When there is no connector for the selected document management system—or when the use case requires specific functionality—the alternative is usually an API integration combined with custom development.
Many IT teams have the opportunity to choose the document management system for Bizagi because they do not yet have an ECM platform and already work with Bizagi. In this situation, it is worth asking: Which platform will help me minimize integration effort and avoid having to build a document management interface from scratch?
When considering a document management system for Bizagi, it is common to assume that an API integration will need to be developed: consuming services, programming calls, building an interface for listing documents, and maintaining all that code as both platforms evolve.
However, there is a much simpler alternative that is also more powerful than a generic connector: using an embeddable widget.
An embeddable widget is a component inserted directly into a Bizagi screen that displays document management system functionality within the business process itself, adapted to the process requirements. For business users, the experience is completely transparent: they can access, create, preview, or download documents without leaving Bizagi or opening another application.
Instead of developing an integration with the document management system from scratch, the ECM itself provides this functionality ready to use. Bizagi simply incorporates it into the process through a configurable component.
This is Athento’s approach.
The widget makes it possible to integrate document management into any Bizagi process while keeping documents centralized in the ECM system. Security policies, permissions, versions, retention rules, and audit controls continue to be applied there. Other applications involved in the company’s processes can also access the files and data. In this way, processes remain in Bizagi while documents continue to live in the corporate document repository.
Essentially, embedded document management components eliminate much of the development associated with integrating a document management system for Bizagi and, above all, eliminate the effort required to maintain that code over time.
In a traditional integration, document management logic ends up distributed between Bizagi and the document management system. Part of it lives in the ECM and part in the code developed specifically for Bizagi. With an embedded component, the opposite happens: all document management logic remains in the document management software, and Bizagi simply consumes it.
The BPM platform continues to orchestrate the process, while the ECM platform remains responsible for storing, classifying, searching, and serving documents.
This considerably reduces implementation effort because the IT team does not need to develop or maintain its own document management interface within Bizagi.
Let’s look at the specific advantages of this approach:
| API Integration | Athento Embedded Widget |
|---|---|
| Develop an interface to list and manage documents | The interface is already included |
| Program calls to the ECM API | Communication is integrated into the component |
| Implement document searches and filters | The document management system’s capabilities are reused |
| Develop a document viewer | Included |
| Maintain integration code | There is no integration code to maintain |
| Adapt the interface when the ECM evolves | The widget evolves together with Athento |
Using embedded components from the document management system for Bizagi also reduces the project’s technical debt. Instead of adding another integration that must be reviewed every time Bizagi or the document management system evolves, the embedded component decouples both platforms and concentrates functional evolution within the ECM.
As a result, projects can generally be implemented faster and with lower long-term maintenance costs.
Integration through an embedded component is designed so that the IT team does not need to develop a document management interface within Bizagi. In practice, the process comes down to three steps. This approach is aligned with our low-code vision for document management and with Athento’s commitment to reducing the time-to-value of document management projects.
From the Athento administration interface, you define how the component should behave: which documents it should display, which query it should use against the document repository, which document types (forms) can be created, and which actions will be available to the user, such as opening, previewing, downloading, or deleting documents.
You can also configure aspects such as authentication, the fields or metadata that will automatically be assigned to new documents, and the spaces or case files that the widget will work with.
Once the configuration is complete, Athento automatically generates a code snippet ready to use. See: Generating Embedded Components for External Pages
To adapt the component to each process, Athento allows you to configure aspects such as:
All of this configuration is carried out graphically from Athento.
The generated code snippet is inserted into Bizagi’s embedded control. There is no need to develop a specific interface or program calls to the document management system’s API: the component itself establishes communication with Athento using the previously defined configuration.
Once the process has been deployed, users work with documents directly from the Bizagi screen. They can access the document repository, upload new documents, open documents, preview them, or download them without leaving the business process.
Below is an example of an embeddable component that allows users to create a document.
When evaluating a document management system for Bizagi, compatibility is only one of the factors to consider. Any integration should also be analyzed in terms of implementation effort, maintenance costs, and its ability to evolve over time.
An architecture in which Bizagi focuses on process orchestration while the document management system handles the document lifecycle makes it possible to keep both systems decoupled and take advantage of the strengths of each one.
If, in addition, this integration can be implemented using embedded components instead of custom development, the project can significantly reduce implementation time and the associated technical debt.
Athento offers precisely this approach. Its embeddable widgets make it possible to incorporate complete document management capabilities within Bizagi without developing a dedicated interface, while keeping documents centralized, secure, and available to the organization’s other applications.
If your organization is evaluating a document management system for Bizagi, it is worth analyzing not only the repository’s functionality but also the real cost of integrating and maintaining it over the coming years. A decoupled architecture, where Bizagi continues to manage processes and the ECM handles document management, generally provides a more scalable solution that is easier to evolve and has lower operating costs.
Request a technical session with our specialists. We will review one of your real processes, configure the embedded component, and estimate the implementation effort so you can evaluate the solution using concrete data before starting the project.
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