Alfresco Activiti Workflows

Introduction to Workflows

The automation of a business process, in whole or part, during which documents, information or tasks are passed from one participant to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules.

Examples:

•   When you submit an insurance claim, you are initiating a workflow.

•   When you check on the status of your loan application, you are asking for metadata    about a running workflow.

•   When you give the final approval for a piece of web content to be published, it is likely you are completing a workflow. 

Real-time results:

The Toyota car company adopted Ford’s assembly line in the 1950s to develop their own production system. Over the following years, the benefits of their system resulted in:

•   Productivity increases between 300% to 400%.
•   Labour productivity increased an average of 25% a year.
•   Defect rates reduced from over 2000 to less than 50 parts per million, and in many  to less than 10 parts per million.
•   Cost of quality cut by over 60%.
•   Work-in-process inventory cut by more than 80%.

Why Workflows?!

What is Alfresco Activiti?

• Activiti is an open source, standalone workflow engine supported by Alfresco.
• Another advantage is that Activiti can be used anywhere, any project!!!
• Some popular workflow engines are- Orchestra, jBPM
• All it needs Java !
• Developing Alfresco Activiti workflow                                                                   – Eclipse Activiti plugin                                                                                         – Alfresco Activiti web editor (http://activiti.alfresco.com)

Why two workflow engines in Alfresco?! 

    Starting with Alfresco 4, Alfresco has two embedded Advanced Workflow engines to choose from: JBoss jBPM and Activiti.

     The JBoss jBPM engine is the original Advanced Workflow engine included with Alfresco. Desiring to have an Apache-licensed workflow engine, Alfresco hired jBPM creator, Tom Baeyens, and some of his team to start a new open source project aimed at building an Apache-licensed, BPMN 2.0 compliant workflow engine. The result is Activiti.

     Both jBPM and Activiti are open source and both can be used as standalone workflow engines in solutions completely unrelated to Alfresco and document management.

Types of Alfresco Workflows

•     Alfresco basic workflows
•     Alfresco advanced workflows

Alfresco Basic Workflow

•      Are configurable by non-technical end-users
•      Leverage rules, folders, and actions

Below is the typical basic workflow

                  

Assigning the user for user task

Another example:

Alfresco Advanced Workflow

•      Are defined by business analysts and developers using a graphic tool or by writing xml.
•       Leverage rules, folders, and actions

Below is the sample advanced workflow created by OMG:

Steps to deploy the activiti workflow:

 Below are the steps to deploy the workflow process created by Alfresco Editor:

1. Once the workflow is created, save it.

2. No error message is thrown if the created workflow is the correct one.

3. Export the workflow as xml file with the extension--> .bpmn20.xml

4. Note down the process id from the xml

5. Navigate to the shareconfig.xml file and rename the below:

     config condition= activiti$<Process-ID>

6. Restart the Tomcat server

7. Login to Activiti Explorer:

   localhost:8080/alfresco/activiti-admin

8. Upload the xml file that was created.

9. If the xml is uploaded without any error, it is clear that the file does not contain any faults in it.

10. Login to Alfresco Share

11. In the user dashboard, click on 'Start Workflow' from the 'My Tasks' dashlet

12. The page is navigated to Start Workflow.

13. From the dropdown list, select the workflow that we deployed.

14. The page is loaded with the workflow details.