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.
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.
To monitor the progress of a task, escalation conditions can be defined. Escalation conditions can be used to cause an escalation notification to be sent to a set of people if tasks are not claimed or are not completed within a defined time limit. 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 notification is sent.
Last updated: Tue Dec 06 04:14:40 2005
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