We submitted SkyXoft Procx and got our
certification of good to go!

We’ve been working hard in these previous weeks getting version 2.5 of Procx out on the streets. Most of the new features comes as part of the feedback we’ve been getting from our customers. The winner feature of all was a better web client interface. So, we dedicated the majority of the time in developing a new client with all the features requested. Here’s a preview of what’s coming:

1. The home page: The initial page welcomes every user with a summary of tasks pending and overdue for him. Also, a small calendar shows the tasks a person has for today by default.

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2. The WorkList: this is the main part of the web client. Here you can see all the tasks assigned to you. You can now customize views so you can add or remove fields depending on the process and requests that you manage. For example, if you work for the IT department and handle help desk or maintenance requests, you may have a view that displays the tasks with fields associated to these request. If you work for the human resources department and handle training requests, you may want a view that shows fields from those requests.

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3. RSS Feeds: now you can see tasks in your favorite RSS reader.

4. Tasks detail: You can complete tasks directly from the web, enter and view comments history.

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5. Flow: You can now have a visual representation of the process actually running letting you know in what stage it is right now.

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6. Search: Advance search capabilities and a detail of where is any request.

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7. Reports: Reports can be seen now from the web, including any custom report made using the Procx Studio.

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In conclusion, great features are coming in the next release of our new web client making it very easy for anybody in the organization to receive and complete tasks assigned to them during any process.

For this to happen, tasks must be assign to users or employees inside the
organization. They must then complete it according to their criteria. For
example, in a bank application for creating a new account, the officer will
generally have a task for checking if the person opening the account is already
a customer of the bank, maybe using their social security number (going one step
further this can be automated using a web service that makes a query to the
backend system and returning true if the person is a customer). After the
officer has completed the check, then he can complete the task.

Assigning a task to a person can be made directly or indirectly. In
Procx, you can do it
any way you want. Directly means assigning a task to an employee, a user. For
example, the task described in the previous example can be assign to Jack, an
officer in our Timbuktu branch. You can even get the user from a variable (for
example a user selected in a list on a form). The disadvantage of using this way
is that if Jack is transferred to the Honolulu branch, then you must edit the
process and change the assignment to the new user.

Assigning a task indirectly means not attaching a task to a user, but instead
to a role. A role belongs to an organizational chart and is occupied by a user.
In the previous example, instead of assigning the task to Jack, you can assign
it to the loan officer located in the organizational chart of the Timbuktu
branch. When Jack gets the sad notice that he’s been transferred to Honolulu,
then the only thing to be done is change the user assigned to the loan officer
role in the organizational chart. No other changes are needed in the process and
everything continues to run smoothly.

This is why assigning tasks to roles is the preferred practice when building
workflows generally and one that is totally supported in Procx.

When you are looking to automate this processes you need to find a way to
also take these forms to electronic forms. Then users in the company will have
like a central repository for these requests, allowing them to fill them more
easily and at the same time reduce errors. For developing electronic forms you
have several options in the market:

- Microsoft
Office InfoPath: It’s the product offering from Microsoft. You can easily
draw forms in a very intuitive way. It integrates with other Office products
like Excel, Word and SharePoint. The final produced form is an XML, which makes
it easy to integrate with other applications. For viewing and editing the form,
you need to have InfoPath installed on the client machine.

- XForms: is the W3C standard for
making web forms. It has a whole structure for developing and designing them.
Any organization can take their forms electronic using these technology. You can
view and edit the forms using one of the commercially available products or just
use the Firefox XForms plug-in
which is free. Also with XForms, the final produced form is an XML.

- Developed your own forms: You can also developed your own forms using the
technology you prefer (PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, etc.). The only thing to have in mind
is that the final output must be also an XML to be compatible with other
applications.

Procx allows you to
add workflow to any type of the previous forms.
InfoPath,
XForms or any other
XML file is supported. You can design the process and use the fields from the
form to build business rules and customized notifications. This provide an
integrated environment for developing forms and the workflow for handling the
requests. Real process automation.

I think SharePoint is one of the must have components everybody using Windows Server 2003 should have installed. As a free piece, the WSS version allows you to share files and collaborate with peers in the organization. It has document versioning capabilities in the web site and acts as central repository for document storage.

One of the coolest thing I find about it, is the integration with Microsoft Office InfoPath. InfoPath allows you to create forms that are routinely use in the business like purchase orders, expense reimbursement and management, vacation requests, etc. in an easy to use interface. Then you can publish these forms in SharePoint and every employee will be able to see them and fill them. Then you also have a central repository of forms.

The next step in this document and form collaboration environment is to add workflow or approval processes to these documents. That’s why we have made it easy to combine Procx and SharePoint workflow. Procx has features and activities for integration with SharePoint and InfoPath giving already established users of these platforms a huge return on their investments.

See more information about Procx and SharePoint here and see the movie here.

• The ability to start a process from an email.
• Create Microsoft Word and Excel documents in the process.
• Start a process from a database table.
• Support for global variables.

Also an important offering we now have is the
services offering.
Now you can buy from our online store, besides the licenses you need for Procx,
also services like the creation of InfoPath and other type of forms, Web
Services for database integration and other related services, allowing you to
buy the whole solution and starting to benefit from Procx right away.

There are many other details in the product that will make the creation of
processes and flow definition event more creative.

We have also made available a series of movies where you can see Procx in
action and how the integration with SharePoint and InfoPath works. You can see
them here.

When working with general users in the enterprise, we always need to understand how they relate to each other. Thinking about a person as an entity can bring us a lot of trouble when we are trying to model a process for the organization.

Users don’t do tasks for themselves, they always need information (either from the customer or from colleagues) so they are always in constant contact with other employees in the company and with their direct superior. This last person act as facilitator in process execution.

So, what’s the best way we can use to model users in the organization? The most common way to do it: Organizational Charts. They give us an easy way to create roles, create hierocracies of roles, define departments and assign final users of these roles and the levels they belong to. Levels give us another easy way to handle hierocracy in the company. In this case, the organizational chart has the intelligence to know who are the managers or directors of a certain department.

When building a process, assigning roles to execute the activities is as simple as selecting them from the organizationa, chart. At the time of execution, though, is where the magic comes in. when you assign for example, a direct role to an activity, Procx will go and get the actual user from the organizational chart. But, we can also assign an activity to a manager, and depending on who started the process, Procx can know automatically who’s department manager to sent the request.

This kind of modeling give us full power when working with processes and activities through the organization and let us view it as a whole.

When you are orchestrating business processes in the organization, what you are controlling is the flow of information. This information can be used for taking decisions using business rules, creating documents, etc. In some time of the process, generally at then, the information needs to be persisted in some sort of system for later consultation and reporting.

Procx provide this capability using industry standard Web Services. Inside processes, you can place web services activities and send information from forms through them. This allows you integrate with third party systems like accountant systems or customer relationship management systems. In a expense approval process for example, at the end you may want to send this information to the accounts payable system directly. Even more, if your third party application supports it, you can print the check also. Possibilities are endless.

Not only you can send information, but you can also receive information inside processes using Procx. You can use this for example for taking decisions. In a loan application, during the process you may want to check the credit score of the applicant, and make decisions based on that.

When talking about integration, web services are the best technology tool to use. They are easy to build by developers and almost any new software application is coming with pre-built web services for integration purposes.

Assigning tasks to people in an organization is what defines the everyday operations of a company. Request can come from anywhere in the organization or from outside and they must handled in a certain way. For example, a bank must handle loan requests from customers or the accounts payable department must handle expense request forms from any department.

As the company grows, the amount of requests also grows. Sometimes we need to balance the amount of work between several group of people. We can assign requests to them base for example in a one by one basis. We assign one loan request form to official 1, the next one to official 2 and so on until starting again from official 1. Or, we can assign more requests to the fastests official, so we can increase productivity.

Both models of assignment are supported in SkyXoft Procx activities. You can configure the group of roles that will handle requests and the type of assignment. You’re incrementing the performance of processes automatically besides the performance gain from automating them.

If you are using a business process management or workflow application like Procx, you can maximize the benefit and your ROI if you use a document management system.

A document management system provides a central repository for documents (any kind of documents), versioning, metadata for documents, advance search capabilities and other collaboration tools (like discussion forums, contact lists, task management, schedules, etc.) that will let you collaborate with the whole company in a better way.

Out of the box, SkyXoft Procx supports Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services (the free version) as a document management system (also supports physical folders). But not only provides support, it also adds integration and a series of tasks that can be used at any moment during your process.

When you define a process in Procx, you can attach it to a document library in SharePoint. Any document created or saved in the the library will automatically start the process. You can also assign processes to folders inside document libraries, and not having to create multiple document libraries for various processes.

Some of the tasks you can use in your process include the Lock Document and Unlock Document that allows you to check-in and check-out a document from a document library and preventing other people from modifying it during the process execution. You also have the Copy Document and Move Document that allows, as the name implies, to copy or move a document. But, not only do this, it can copy or move the document across document libraries or across document libraries of different sites and also (as is this was not enough ) the document keeps it’s version history.

Other useful task is the Document Library that allows you to use the already defined custom fields (the metadata) of the document library where the document resides. You can use this fields for creating business rules in the process, filling out forms or send them to other third party systems using Web Services. A field list from the document library will look like the figure on the right.

This kind of integration will provide the most benefit to any SharePoint installation and also, to any Procx installation, letting you master and coordinate your company processes altogether.