Workflow Soluiton

While the Process Manager Portal (as part of the Workflow Advanced) is a great administrator tool, the Workflow Basic does have significant Administrator capabilities - from the very simple to the very complex. Because Workflow is a development environment, it has the flexibility to allow you to either use its simple admin interface or define and interact in your own administration system.

The simple admin system as part of Workflow Basic is a "WorkflowManagment.aspx" page that always deploys with each project. This page will give you a snapshot of all processes that are in process and where each task is currently assigned, when the next escalation is scheduled and when the 'time out' is scheduled. From this screen you can also re-assign a task. To make this page effective you need to configure the following items on the Assignments tab inside the Dialog Workflow component.

1. Task Source - If you are not using an outside task management system, such as the Altiris Task List or the Sharepoint Task List, you need to make sure that this is set to "Default Task Source"
2. Define the "Task Name" to be relevant to the process. If you use the ellipsis you will pull up the merge text editor which will allow you to combine fixed text and variable. For example, "New Hardware Request - [RequestorName]"
3. You need to assign the task to a person or group, under the "Task Assignment" section the most common practice is to assign the task to whomever you would normally send the email notification to.

Click to view.

If you complete each of these steps you will be able to have a good view into your all processes running, which tasks inside each process are assigned, and when escalations and 'time outs' for each of those tasks are scheduled to fire.

Click to view.

Click to view.

Click to view.

Because Workflow is a development environment, you can also design your own administration tool, if the basic administration tool does not suit your needs. The most common way of achieving this is with a SQL table, you can create a record for each new process. Each time a task is assigned or completed update the record in SQL and report against that database. This way you will have all of the flexibility you need to control and report against and even dashboard the data and steps relevant in your process.

Before the release of Workflow Advanced, we have helped companies develop their own process management portal in this manor, with Workflow Advanced, this functionality is more "out of the box", as well as, provides some really great additional features.