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Introduction

Workflow engines are awesome tools that help combine business rule processing with logical functions.  Most commonly, they are built around State Machine processing and more specifically, on Finite State Machine concepts.  That is to say, a workflow should have states and variables that can be observed for transitions and updated as necessary.  There is always a starting point that initiates activity an end state where the workflow concludes its work.

Workflows can take a number of different forms; the two most common are long-running and orchestration. 

• Long-running workflows are ones that generally require manual intervention and states are infrequently updated making transitions take a long time. 

• Orchestration workflows generally happen a lot faster and generally function unattended.  Transitions are quick making the workflow an enhanced flow control implementation or middleware.

The main goal of a workflow engine is flexibility and visibility.  We can write workflows in application code, but once set, they are seldom easy to change and they are really not visible.  Today's workflow engines can accommodate architectural advances in web services to make the workflow creation process more approachable and easier to maintain.  We can now introduce a combination of human and automated players with a process that is transparent and very functional.

On this page, we will go over the key features of IFS's workflow partner, ProcessMaker.  We will also examine those features as it pertains to use.  For more documentation on how to use ProcessMaker, see the ProcessMaker wiki .

Best Practices