About human tasks

A human task is a component that involves a person interacting with a service or another person.

The interaction can be initiated either by a person or by an automated service. A service that is initiated by a person can be either an automated implementation or a service that is provided by another person. A human task that is invoked by an automated service can be replaced easily by an automated implementation.

Tasks can be used to implement staff activities in business processes that require human interactions, such as manual exception handling and approvals. All other exception handling is modeled natively in Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL, abbreviated to BPEL), by using faults and fault handlers, or compensation.

The types of human tasks are as follows:
Participating tasks
Support Web-service-to-person interactions, which enable a person to implement a service. For example, a participating task can be a staff activity in a business process.
Graphic of a participating task
Administrative tasks
Administrative tasks are similar to participating tasks, except that they are used by administrators to solve technical problems that occur in processes. Administrative tasks support authorization and user interface settings for starting or administering business processes and human activities. Currently, administration tasks are only created and managed by Business Flow Manager.
Originating tasks
Support person-to-computer interactions, which enables people to create, initiate, and start services through a graphical user interface. For example, a user can start a business process, or send it an event by means of an originating task.
Graphic of an originating task
Purely human tasks
Support person-to-person interactions, which enable a person to invoke a task as though it were an originating task. This invoked task is then performed by another person, who interacts with it as though it were a participating task. Purely human tasks do not interact with business processes or other Web services.
Graphic of interactions in a purely human task.

Who can interact with a task can be determined using one of the supported staff directories. Work items are created for users who have a reason to view or interact with the task.

The human task manager supports the following types of user registry:

Escalations

An escalation is a course of action that is executed when a task is not completed satisfactorily within a specific period of time. For example, if tasks are not claimed or are not completed within a defined time limit. You can specify one, or more, escalations for a task. These escalations can be started either in parallel or as a chain of escalations.

Escalations are initialized when the associated task reaches a certain state in its lifecycle. After a well defined duration, the task state is verified, and if it does not meet the modeled expectation, the escalation action is invoked. The following escalations actions are supported:
  • Work items are created for a set of users
  • E-mails are sent to the designated recipients
  • Notification events are sent to registered consumers

Terms of use |

Last updated: Thu Apr 27 14:54:56 2006

(c) Copyright IBM Corporation 2006.
This information center is powered by Eclipse technology (http://www.eclipse.org)