Before you begin

Before you use Workbench, you should understand the requirements and the purpose of the processes and forms that you want to model, create, or automate. Be sure you understand the context in which your processes and forms will be used, how data will be captured, and how the data will flow through a process or between related processes or forms.

Depending on your organization, a business analyst or a project team may perform an analysis of existing processes and forms or may plan out the goals of the project. Often, an analysis or plan will map out the flow of a process or set of processes, identify the people involved in the process and determine what their roles are, and identify the kinds of forms to be used.

Your organization also must determine who will be part of your development team. The team could include administrators, process developers, form developers, form authors, and possibly programmers to handle lower-level coding:

Administrators:

Install, monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot the environment. They import and export files using Applications and Services, and install, start, and stop services.

Process developers:

Work with business analysts to configure and map process requirements to Workbench functionality. They translate process definitions and implement processes in Workbench.

Form developers:

Develop and modify intelligent and interactive forms in Workbench, typically using scripting for tight back-end integration. These forms often support calculations and events.

Form authors:

Create and modify simple forms in Workbench. They may design parts of a form before handing it over to a form developer. They may also create fragments.

Each member on your team requires permissions and roles assigned to them. (See Setting access permissions.)

When the planning and analysis is complete, your development team is assembled, and the computer environments are set up, you can start to use Workbench.

You can model, create, and automate processes and forms using Workbench. The development of a complete workflow solution can be a large and complex undertaking, and the specific steps your organization follows will be unique. However, many organizations follow these simplified generic steps, which are often simultaneous:

• Create the forms and, if necessary, define the data constructs that will pass information between steps in the process.

• Create a process diagram that links together participants, forms, and services, defining the overall life cycle of the process.

• Create any resources required by the forms or process diagram, such as common image files or data files.

  When the solution is complete, it must be thoroughly tested. Do preliminary testing in the development environment, and then move the processes and forms to a separate testing environment for more thorough testing.