Hi!
I'm fairly new to BPM and I've run into a problem I don't know how to solve.
I'm building a process involving several hundred people loosely connected to a company. Simply put there's a task each of these should do each month, involving a number of steps. We'd like to start a process for each of these (by a generic user in the portal, not by the people involved). They'll be sent information and do some things and then the system will do some thing and then they'll do some other things and then they're done for the month.
For at least one workstep we'd like to wait for a manual response, that is: check the "Send email to performer and complete if answered" on Activation. But as far as I've been able to tell, you can only do that if the performer is a registered user. Is that really the case or can you specify the email address used for this step somehow?
As we'd like to run this process with a considerable number of users we have no interest in adding them all to our BPM database as users (and new people might be added at any time). All I want to do is send them and email and wait for them to reply. There will never be any need for them to log into the portal, they don't need any type of permissions or password or anything else: I only need an email, which we have in a dataslot. Also, if we absolutely must add them as actual users it must be done "on the fly" and it seems absolutely pointless to have to do all that when all I want is to send them an email and wait for the response. :)
Oh, and just to be clear: I don't just want to send just an email. I know how to change email address from a dataslot when I do that. It is just the "wait for a reply" I want.
Help?
Hi,
We are exploring for any possible alternatives and will get back to you shortly.
I got a solution from this from Progress (thank you!):
1. Create a new dataslot of character type, and specify a name say "mail".
2. Go to the performers tab and click on "Add" button to add a performer. A "New Performer" wizard will pop up. Select "user" as type on the first page of the wizard and click on next.
3. On the next page under the text box "Enter a name:", type "@" and it will list some options including "mail". Select mail (or type "@mail") and click on finish. This will create a new performer "@mail".
4. Go to the activity customer wants to associate this performer to and change its performer to "@mail".
5. Also check "Send email to performer and complete if answered" for this activity under Advanced>On Activation.
6. Add "mail" to fields under start activity. And deploy the app.
7. Now in the portal, while creating an instance you can specify any valid email id against mail. Basically here if you enter a username it will fetch the email of the user and then send the mail, otherwise if you enter an email, it will directly send the mail.”
And it seems to work just fine. :)