Overview Typically, a business process involves a number of transactions such as looking up information from a customer database, taking an order, adding a new order to a database, updating prices, etc. To guarantee that all parts of the business process are completed, a resource manager is used to keep track of each step (or transaction) to make sure it is completed. If all the steps can be completed successfully, then the complete process will be committed. This means that any updates to external systems and iProcess case data will be performed and committed in a single transaction. However, if one or more parts of the process cannot be completed for any reason (such as a database being offline), no parts of the process are committed. This means that all the external systems such as databases, document management systems and legacy systems are left in the same state as when the process was started i.e. no data updates are performed. There are two types of transaction scope: local and distributed. The difference between them is the number of resource managers used to control the transaction. A local transaction uses just one resource manager and a distributed transaction involves using more than one resource manager. Both of these are described in the following sections.