WorkflowDesigner

Hardly any editorial department can do without software support for their processes. Support for workflows has therefore long since been a standard requirement for content management.

FirstSpirit™ provides very flexible workflow technology, developed in-house, which is optimally tailored to content maintenance requirements and is an integral part of the system. FirstSpirit™ workflows can be executed on any objects in FirstSpirit™, but can also run context-free.

The structure of workflows

Workflows are basically made up of three types of element:

• Status represent the states in which an object can be.
• Activities are normally activities performed by a user in order to convert an object into a new state. However, in special cases, such activities can also be automated. In FirstSpirit™, this then takes place via scripts, which run on the basis of the FirstSpirit™ Access API.
• Transitions represent the connections between status and activities. They define the actions which a user can perform during an activity.

Graphic modelling

WorkflowDesigner provides a graphic editor for very easy and fast modelling of the necessary workflows. Status, activities and transitions can be quickly combined with each other with a few clicks of a mouse and diverse properties can be defined using dialogs on the objects. A status can be assigned, among other things, a maximum dwell time, responsible persons and a priority. An activity on the other hand can, e.g include a mail dispatch. This mail dispatch is freely configurable, so that diverse messages can be sent to task creators, authoriszed persons, responsible persons and freely definable mail recipients.

Transitions can be assigned action names, which are displayed to the user as buttons in the activity dialogs of the workflow instances. In addition, context-related or explicit rights can be set at transitions.

After a workflow has been graphically modelled, it can be immediately executed in FirstSpirit™.

Flexible rights management

Once workflows have been defined, they can be assigned any number of objects within FirstSpirit™, whereby this assignment applies to all objects within the respective sub-tree. In this way, workflows can be applied on, e.g. content, structural elements, media and templates.

The rights defined in the workflow can also be modified for each of these object assignments: For example, if a workflow exists which describes the creation of press releases including the releases and deployment, this workflow can also be used to create news articles – even if other people or groups are responsible for this!

Easy to use

Users can start workflows directly on the objects, if they wish they can even start a workflow for several objects simultaneously. The respective status of an object is visually by definable colour codes.

A user finds the activities to be processed by them either centrally on their personal FirstSpirit™ homepage or in their task list and can be processed there immediately. Activities can also be performed directly on the object. In addition, FirstSpirit™ can also send notifications as e-mails. From these messages, it is possible to start the FirstSpirit™ clients with a click. The clients then automatically navigate to the object to be processed.

Extendable as much as required

In automatic activities, any operations can be performed on the content repository of FirstSpirit™. In addition, external systems or databases can be connected from automatic activities.