A Workflow System for Supporting Group Activities of an Enterprise

摘要

Workflow technology provides a good way to mediate the responsibility flow in a business process from person to person and from task to task. However, most current workflow systems are not able to do this very well. The main reasons are: most activities of a workflow are executed asynchronously and respectively according to their workflow model, and cannot be executed synchronously; External GroupWare tools cannot be integrated very well, which makes the system not be best of supporting human-human synchronous interactions. CFlow (Cooperative workFlow) has been developed by our group recently to overcome the above shortcomings. In this paper, the main implementation techniques of CFlow are described; a process model visually describing method based on constraints is introduced; and an approach to integrate GroupWare tools is presented.