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Passing The Baton With Four Enterprise-Ready Workflow Management Products

By Nancy Cox Gone are the days of routing workflow by inter-office mail. Today, enterprise-ready workflow products are competing in an ardent race to manage workflow tasks for your organization. Workflows generally fall into two categories. They can be simple, unstructured, ad hoc processes created by a user to route an office supply request form. Or, they can be highly complex and structured operations created by a designer for processing hundreds of medical insurance claims per day.

Workflow products have not yet achieved critical mass because most have been proprietary, expensive and required a dedicated staff of designers and administrators. But today's breed of workflow products function on open systems, such as the Web and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), use widely adopted application programming interfaces (APIs), such as Microsoft's Mail API (MAPI), have a much lower entry cost and can be accessed and used right out of the box. These capabilities are bringing about a resurgence in the acceptance of workflow products. Often, these products use the underlying messaging system or the corporate intranet for routing workflow tasks to recipients.

On Your Mark To get on the forefront of this resurgence, we tested products that run on Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 and permit the creation and routing of simple, ad hoc workflows. We wanted products that have a Web interface or use a messaging system to route workflows. The products that met our criteria were Action Technologies' ActionWorks Metro and ActionWorks OnTrack; FileNet Corp.'s FileNet Ensemble; Keyfile Corp.'s Keyflow for Microsoft Exchange Server; and Open Text Corp.'s Open Text Livelink Intranet Suite 7.

We designed two workflows on each product specifying rules, fo rms, data and participants. The first, a "new employee" workflow, routed forms used for 401(k), benefits, telephone service, for example, through several departments, including human resources, security, facilities, mailroom and payroll, to downstream departments, such as e-mail administration, LAN support and telecommunications, to complete the workflow. Each step required the recipient to perform several tasks, such as select a response, attach a document and delegate the work. The second workflow, a credit approval process, was a bit more complex--it involved loop-back steps and conditional routing based on a specified response. Each workflow had attachments, deadlines and roles (where supported). Where appropriate, Microsoft Exchange 5.0 was used as our messaging system.

First to cross the finish line was Action Technologies ActionWorks Metro and ActionWorks OnTrack. We found it to be an excellent example of Web-messaging integration, offering the ability to create, deliver and track workflow processe s. The integration of the Web with a messaging system was unique among the products we tested. Open Text Livelink received high marks for providing more value-added features, such as document management, libraries, and electronic forms generation.

Action Technologies ActionWorks Metro and ActionWorks OnTrack
Action Technologies takes a fundamentally different view of work and workflow than the other products we tested. Its goals are to manage the commitments people make and to provide an easy way to separate work from information items. Metro is the interface to the workflow engine; OnTrack, the application for designing and launching of ad hoc workflows and organizing work. When combined, these two products straddle proprietary messaging systems and the Web to provide comprehensive generation, tr acking, access and management of both ad hoc and structured workflow processes.

The ot her products that we tested are messaging system-dependent without Web interfaces or Web-only applications with no messaging system integration. Web interfaces provide quick access to work, directly from the browser or from a hot link within an e-mail message. However, we found Metro's electronic forms using HTML cumbersome and time consuming; Action Technologies says it plans on providing on-the-fly generation in the next release.