There’s a project which we’re doing for the govt which necessisiates the use of a workflow system. I’m looking for advice on what software systems we can use (either commercial or open source / freeware) with appropriate customizations.
Steps:
0. We monitor a certain site for “notifications”. Whenever a notification is posted, this is what happens for each notification.
1. A team of 2-3 people (our employees) have to examine the document, examine whether we need to act on it. One person examines it, the other reviews the first’s decision/action.
2. If we need to act on it, one of them needs to prepare a sort of summary document for outside experts. Again, another person (not the writer) needs to review it.
3. This document needs to be sent to outside experts (emailed in most cases, but also via postal mail). A database of experts and their specialities needs to be maintained.
4. A system of keeping track of which document went to whom and when needs to be maintained.
5. Responses will be received from the outside-experts (electronically and postal). The system needs to keep track of from whom we did NOT receive responses, so that we can remind them.
6. Once all responses have been collated, the company employees need to prepare a report which needs to be approved by a supervisor before it can be sent out to the govt.
I understand that a number of tools would be required and/or extensive customizations. That’s fine – looking for inputs on all these aspects.
Steve!
I would advocate Nintex Workflow since I have positive experience working with it. Installation and initial configuration is quite easy although features are impressive. It also built is a way that end users can build their own flows, it’s fairly easy to do. Also you can build more complex flows, create custom actions and use the web services SDK to access the activities/perform actions from the outside of the SharePoint – I used it from InfoPath and Silverlight forms.