We are trying to explore the option of moving from Documentum to Flowable for our project. There are a few questions that I had and was hoping the experienced member in this group can provide their feedback:
What type of DMS is bundled with the Enterprise Edition of Flowable? Please can you provide some technical documentations on it. Features of interest would be things like the security model, ACL mechanism, encryption in motion and rest.
Flowable DMS: How does a document get secured from the administrator? What type of audit events are there? How are audits managed?
Flowable BPM: Is there Role based Manual Task assignment?
Use Case 1: A task is send to a “Seller 1 Role”; The person in the Seller 1 Role is say a user named John. Now John should get this task. But then John goes on leave and the “Seller 1 Role” is given to the Newton. Will Newton automatically get all the tasks that were with John in the Seller 1 Role?
Use Case 2: John and Newton work in 2 shifts. Will both of them get the task if they are both in Seller 1 Role?
Use Case 3: John and Newton work in 2 shifts but as a company policy John can see the task between 9 AM - 5 PM and Newton from 5 PM to 10 PM. Both are in the Seller 1 Role and the task was sent to the Seller 1 role
It is my understanding that with Flowable I can have my own interface written in Angular?
Flowable BPM:
Can a Workflow Supervisor reassign a task?
Can a Person who was part of the workflow (Not the initiator nor Supervisor) track the workflow?
Can a person bulk complete tasks? Use Case: John is able to identify that these 10 tasks can be done by Newton. He forwards all the 10 tasks to Newton without opening each task?
Well, as I worked for many years with John Newton, starting at Documentum and then co-founding Alfresco, I do understand the space. There’s quite a difference between the content services in the open source version than the enterprise one, but we try and keep this forum focused on the open source side. I’ll DM you and we can see if there’s another way to discuss the enterprise DM capabilities.
On BPM roles, we use the concept of candidate groups and users where a task is not directly assigned to an individual. Anyone from the group or list of users can claim a task to work on. There’s also the concept of participants, so a task can be assigned directly to an individual, but other users can participate on the task. With the enterprise version there’s lots of options on controlling that - the enterprise docs can help there (documentation.flowable.com). There’s no default way to handle things like employee shifts, but the real difference with Flowable is that there’s many options for extending the behavior - doing things like auto assignment when a task is created (or assigning an open task as soon as a user has completed their current task) - and you could extend the behavior to switch assignment based on some logic or calendar.
Flowable has a very rich REST API, so you can quickly build a UI in any framework to get what you want. There’s an example Angular app in open source (the enterprise product uses React).
With the open source version, the extension points and interfaces allow you to provide functionality such as reassigning tasks. There’s no bulk operation in the defualt UIs, but not hard to do this with the APIs. The enterprise version has more permission control options for how dirrent types of participants can interact with tasks, processes and cases. With the open source, you can make it do what you want - the APIs and extension points give you great flexibility.
If you’re really looking for the enterprise version, you can download a trial version from flowable.com. There’s a separate forum for the enterprise version.