Defining Business Processes and Workflows

Defining a business process or "workflow" involves planning, designing, and automating the workflow between internal users, external customers, and business partners or suppliers. Automating the business processes within an organization allows work to be tracked and handled in an efficient, predictable, and timely manner. Once a business workflow has been defined, work flows through prearranged routes and completes as the predefined work steps are performed. Automating the process enables administrators and users to track and manage the work along the way.

Defining a business workflow typically involves include using a graphical workflow interface, such as the FileNet Process Designer, to design a map of the workflow (this map is also known as a "workflow definition"). Once the workflow definition has been completed and validated, the designer checks the workflow definition into a Content Engine-managed Object Store or File Store.

Using the Process Designer and Configuration Console, you can customize the workflow in a variety of ways, such as creating new queues, adding operations to queues, adding new users, associating Step Processor applications with specific steps in a workflow, defining step attributes, attaching documents that have been checked into an Object Store to workflow step operations, and so on.

You might want to design workflows that allow you to take advantage of submaps or system steps. You can call a submap from any map within the workflow definition. If a submap defines a process you want to execute multiple times, you can call the submap when needed, instead of having to define the process in several places. System steps allow you to define workflows that use system timers automatically, temporarily suspend workflow processing, or end processing without user intervention.

Operation development

If you define operations (for example, specific operations to be performed at a given step), you will need to develop applications or scripts to execute when the operation is called. You use either the Web Application Toolkit and/or the Process Java APIs to develop custom workflow processing applications to get and complete work in the Process Engine. Similarly, you use either Workplace and/or the Content Java APIs to access and update objects in the Content Engine Object Store.

More Information

See the Help for the Process Designer, Configuration Console, and Process Engine Administrators for detailed information on creating queues, or operations, or designing business-specific workflows.

See the Help for Web Application Toolkit, Help for Content Java APIs, and Process Java API JavaDoc reference documentation for additional information on developing applications that execute when invoking queue operations.