Overview of Workflows
A workflow represents a business process, and is used to map business rules and processes to your organization. This section covers information about Deployment Management workflows.
The basic components of a workflow are as follows:
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Begin: For each workflow, you must explicitly define the first eligible workflow step.
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Workflow steps: Events that are linked together to form a complete workflow. The basic types of workflow steps are:
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Decision steps: Represent manual activities performed outside of PPM. For example, a user or group of users approves a request.
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Execution steps: Represent actions that are automated through PPM. For example, a Web page is updated with the results of a test.
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Condition steps: Logic steps used in complex workflow processing. For example, you can set up a condition step that allows the workflow to proceed only when each workflow step is completed.
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Subworkflow steps: Represent multiple workflows steps (the subworkflow) in a workflow. For example, a test workflow step in the main workflow represents a series of tests and approvals.
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Transition: The results of a workflow step that must be communicated to another workflow step. A transition occurs after a workflow step is completed.
Examples:
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The result of a decision step is Approved or Not Approved.
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The transition for a step labeled Analysis and Design (for a software application) could be Completed or Needs More Work.
Because a single step can have several possible results, you can define multiple outgoing transitions for each workflow step.
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Workflow step security: Determines who has permission to run or choose a result for a workflow step. For example, you can specify that only the development manager can approve or deny a Design Review decision step.
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Notifications: Email alerts sent out at specific workflow steps. For example, when a package reaches an Evaluate decision step in the workflow, an email alert is sent to the development manager.
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Close step: Ends the workflow. It is an execution step that marks the package as completed.
Table 3-1. Component types lists component types included in workflows, and the components of each type that you can access from the Workflow Workbench.