The Collaboration feature is available only for Activity worksteps in Business Processes. Collaboration allows you to set a number of options in BPM Designer which allows the activity workstep to appear as a collaborative task in Business Process Portal. Collaborative tasks allow application users to complete their work by collaborating with other users or groups (referred to as Collaborators). These options include the ability to select a level of collaboration as well as indicating the performers with whom you want to collaborate. You can also select other options such as reassigning tasks, adding Notes to a process, or sending Email or Instant Messaging.
To define collaboration properties:
1. Click the Collaboration tab in the Properties view for an Activity workstep.
2. From the Options section, select one or more of the following options that you want to include in Business Process Portal.
Collaborative Tasks─Select the appropriate options in the beside the drop-down list to indicate whether you want to allow the Business Process Portal user to edit the dataslots associated with the workstep, or only view the dataslots that are now read-only, or see no dataslots.
You can use a CHARACTER dataslot for specifying the collaborator.
Notes─Specify whether you want the Business Process Portal user to see notes at the Instance Level (for all worksteps in the instance) or at the Workstep Level (for the current workstep). For more details regarding Notes, see the Business Process Portal User’s Guide.
Reassign─By default, the assigned performer of this workstep can reassign the task to another performer. To disable reassigning, clear this checkbox.
Email. To allow the assigned performer of this workstep to communicate with any of the collaborators using e-mail.
Instant Messaging─To allow the assigned performer of this workstep to chat with any of the collaborators using Instant Messaging.
3. From the Collaborators section, add the collaborators and also specify the operations the workstep performer can perform with each collaborator in Business Process Portal. Note that there is a column added for each option that you select in the Options section.
a. To add a collaborator, click Add, to open the Select Users dialog box, which you can select one or more of the users or groups and click OK to add them to the Collaborators list.
You cannot add (or create) a queue as a collaborator. Further, you cannot add a group with ‘Any’ member selected as a collaborator or a group with a defined role.
b. For each of the specified collaboration options, select either “true” or “false” from the drop-down list.
To delete a collaborator from the list, select the user or group and click Remove.
For worksteps with default presentation, the options selected in the Options section are displayed in the Task Details page of the workstep and all the collaborators defined in the Collaborators section are available in the Collaborators list in the Create Collaboration page in Business Process Portal.
For Business Processes, you can use the Alerts tab to associate an alert with an Activity workstep when it is initially activated, completed, or as an Overdue action when it is overdue. For more information, see Associating an alert with a workstep.
Collaborative Tasks─Select the appropriate options in the beside the drop-down list to indicate whether you want to allow the Business Process Portal user to edit the dataslots associated with the workstep, or only view the dataslots that are now read-only, or see no dataslots.