Viraj's Weblog

The idea of 'workflow' is being thrown around alot at work. The hope is to streamline business processes.

First of all I think this whole concept of workflow is more complex than it needs to be. One of the least 'vague' packages I found was Openflow, which is based on Zope. I've been doing some reading on Zope and I think it's a very cool web framework. But this Openflow thing has shitty documentation. At least put some howto up to help people try your code. There I noticed links to the Workflow Management Coalition which has some sort of standard out. There is a TALES language specification for defining workflows. Ugh, it's all ripe for picking by commercial packages.

Then I found another package called CMSOpenflow which looks based on Openflow, but requires Zope, Plone, CMS, blah blah. It's still very cryptic to me, and why am I going to install all this stuff for something I have no understanding of.

I thought the simplest workflow, at least that I could understand, was an approval system. There is some purchase request, someone needs to look over it and approve it. Simple.

Pete over at Mako pointed me to Twiki, so I started looking for plugins. I found ApprovalPlugin, which is probably the clearest explanation of a workflow implementation I've read. So I'm reading about it and notice the author. Wow, it's an old co-worker from Z-Kat. Nice work!

I'm still not very excited about this. It's hard to be excited about business processes.