Workflow Soluiton

Now with Workflow 7's ticketing and reporting functionality you can add status and reporting to your processes quickly and easily.

I recently had to build a "Proof of Concept" (POC) for a client proposal that we are working on. The client wanted to generate reports using Workflow to track a process for auditing purposes.

Now as many of you know, in past versions of Workflow we would've had to create a report like this in a couple of different ways: we could have developed a Web Forms Reporting Dashboard or a SQL Reporting Services report. Both of these options would have required some significant development time and additional cost to the project.

Ticketing Functionality

Some of the new ticketing functionality that was created for ServiceDesk 7 in Workflow allows us to develop these reports quickly and easily.

I think it is important to note the ticketing functionality wasn’t developed with this purpose in mind. It was developed to quickly show the status of an SD7 ticket and where the ticket was in the process.

Like most things that are useful in this world, who cares what it was originally intended for, it works.

Basically what you want to do is add the ticketing components to your process.

1. Check “Add Process Component” in the reporting tab, located in the project properties menus at the top of the project tree.
2. This will create and place the “Global Logging” component in your project and set-up your process to be tracked in the process Portal. Please note the "Global Logging" component doesn't have to be part of your data stream.
3. You will need to add the “Setup Process” component at or around the beginning of your process and configure.
4. Then you will want to add a “Set Process State/Status” component to the end of your process when it is completed success

Once you have done that your process will be fully tracked and you can simply create a custom report under the reporting section in the Process Portal.

1. To do this quickly I copied an existing report that was already set-up and I modified for my process.

Now I have a report that tracks the process and I was able to develop the report in about 15 minutes.

I realize that I didn’t dive into a ton of detail in this blog on how the custom reporting components and reports work. That is because one of the Workflow SE’s, Jason Short, just created two videos on this subject. They are available at WorkflowSwat or you can link to them from the resources page of our website. Click here for Process Reporting Video Links.

In conclusion the built-in reporting functionality that was added to Workflow 7 is pretty powerful and you can use it however you want to add functionality to your processes. It add’s a ton of power to your task management processes as it was intended to do but you can also use it as a flag and take advantage of the built in reporting that is integrated to it.

Please let me know if this blog was helpful or if you have used the ticketing reporting functionality to do anything really cool.

Thanks

Tommy Yionoulis
Partner – Consulting Development
WEVO Group
http://wevogroup.com
All Things Symantec Workflow & ServiceDesk 7 Blog.