Overview of Oracle Workflow

 Oracle Workflow delivers a complete workflow management system that supports business process based integration. Its technology enables modeling, automation, and continuous improvement of business processes, routing information of any type according to user-defined business rules.

E-business is accelerating the demand for integration of applications within the enterprise as well as integration of a company's systems with trading partners and business-to-business exchanges. Oracle Workflow automates and streamlines business processes both within and beyond your enterprise, supporting traditional applications based workflow as well as e-business integration workflow. Oracle Workflow is unique in providing a workflow solution for both internal processes and business process coordination between applications.

Routing Information

Business processes today involve getting many types of information to multiple people according to rules that are constantly changing. With so much information available, and in so many different forms, how do you get the right information to the right people? Oracle Workflow lets enterprises provide each person with all the information they need to take action. Oracle Workflow can route supporting information to each decision maker in a business process, including people both inside and outside the enterprise.

Defining and Modifying Business Rules

Oracle Workflow lets you define and continuously improve your business processes using a drag-and-drop process designer.

Unlike workflow systems that simply route documents from one user to another with some approval steps, Oracle Workflow lets you model sophisticated business processes. You can define processes that loop, branch into parallel flows and then rendezvous, decompose into subflows, and more. Because Oracle Workflow can decide which path to take based on the result of a stored procedure, you can use the power of Java and of PL/SQL, the language of the Oracle Database, to express any business rule that affects a workflow process. See: Workflow Processes.

Delivering Electronic Notifications

Oracle Workflow extends the reach of business process automation throughout the enterprise and beyond to include any e-mail or Internet user. Oracle Workflow lets people receive notifications of items awaiting their attention via e-mail, and act based on their e-mail responses. You can even view your list of things to do, including necessary supporting information, and take action using a standard Web browser.

Integrating Systems

Oracle Workflow lets you set up subscriptions to business events which can launch workflows or enable messages to be propagated from one system to another when business events occur. You can communicate events among systems within your own enterprise and with external systems as well. In this way, you can implement point-to-point messaging integration or use Oracle Workflow as a messaging hub for more complex system integration scenarios. You can model business processes that include complex routing and processing rules to handle events powerfully and flexibly.