Human tasks

Draft comment:
Requires review by Kurt Lind
Human tasks are assigned to various people in your organization through work items. Human tasks can be almost any business task that involves a person, for example, completing a form, approving a document or drawing, writing a letter, and so on.

The process is the design for how a series of tasks is done. When a process is started (by someone in your organization or even anonymously by someone completing a form at a Web site), work items are created for the potential owners, that is, all the people who can work on a particular activity.

When you claim an activity, you become the owner of that activity. Only you and the business process administrator can work on that activity in that particular instance of the process. If your work is complex or involved, you can save intermediate stages of it. When you finish the work, you complete the activity. The resulting information is saved and is then available to subsequent activities in the process. Navigation of the process continues until all of the activities are complete.

The following Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) code snippet shows how a staff activity might be implemented in a business process:
<bpel:invoke partnerLink="null"
   portType="QName" operation="ncName"
   inputVariable="ncname" outputVariable="ncname">
 
  <wpc:staff>
   <wpc:potentialOwner>staffQueryVerb</wpc:potentialOwner>
   <wpc:editor>staffQueryVerb</wpc:editor> 
   <wpc:reader>staffQueryVerb</wpc:reader> 

   <!-- Client-specific settings go here --> 

  </wpc:staff>
 
 <!-- standard activity elements go here --> 
</bpel:invoke>  

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