Monthly Archives: November 2005

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.