Possible Email Workflow Tracking Features

This area is for listing all the possible ways in which an email client might be used to facilitate workflow. At some point, OSAF will use this as a starting point to determine which features should go into which release (if any).

There is more discussion and description here than in most of the "possible email features" pages because they are a bit more complicated than most features. Also because the original author wasn't completely sure about how some things work.

Outlook Forms

Outlook allows creation, passing around of, and (KDS presumes) processing of forms. This is useful for a number of workflow processes. For example, you could fill out an expense report by filling out an Outlook form and sending it in. (KDS thinks so, at least. Please correct as appropriate.)

Outlook Voting Buttons

Outlook has a very simplified version of forms called "Voting Buttons" which creates a form with only a few buttons, which are then automatically tracked. For example, you could use voting buttons in a message to the entire company which asks about their holiday party entree choice, e.g. "Beef", "Fish", "Vegetarian".

When people respond, the result shows up in something like a spreadsheet attached to the sent message. Not only does it show each person's response, it also shows the sums of each of the columns. It's thus easy to see that e.g. 72 people want Beef, 25 want Fish, and 53 want Vegetarian.

David Neeley suggests that the voting buttons could be dragged into a message from the toolbar.

The Communicator

Terry Winograd had a project called the Communicator, which was a program that enabled users to attach task status easily to an email message. Task status was something like needs reply, pending, current, completed, etc.

For example, Mabel could tag a message to Chantelle as a "Request". When Chantelle got the request, she could disposition the message as e.g. "Denied" or "Approved".

(Note: I, KDS, am not an expert on the Communicator. Feel more than free to alter my description.)

Zaplets

Zaplets are yet another way to manage workflow inside an organization. Zaplets embed part of a "live applicaiton" inside a DHTML/Javascript email message. The regular HTML email message can contain dynamically fetched data and part of your application. This has the advantage that it works with many existing mail clients, and the disadvantage that it only works while directly Internet connected.

External Resources

• Communicator project slides
• WorkFlow Management Coalition with reference model document

Mailing list messages:

• voting buttons by DuckySherwood
• DanielWeitzner^? asks for attaching policy metadata to mail messages

Contributors

• DuckySherwood - 13 Jan 2003
• MichaelM - 13 Mar 2003

Some References to Python Workflow Implementations

There are two workflow engines available for the Zope server. The DCWorkflow comes with the Zope Content management Framework and the OpenFlow "Product", which follows the WorkFlow^? Management Coalition architecture. There has also been considerable discussion and a sprint on workflow in the context of Zope3. They have designed an architecture that blends the best of DCWorkflow and OpenFlow^?

Dave Kuhlman has a paper titled "Workflow and REST How-to" in which he describes creating a workflow architecture based on flux that implements a business process workflow capability in a web server. The implementation of iCalendar as a Zope "Product" is also available from the author of flux. It is in the sourceforge project as flux. The flux workflow implementation is very small. Less than 200 lines of code.

-- MichaelM - 13 Mar 2003