Captaris Workflow - How It Works

 Captaris Workflow, powered by Teamplate, automates business processes to enable organizations to gain efficiencies, deploy structure, and automate activities within just a small workgroup or throughout the entire organization. Captaris Workflow easily integrates with Microsoft server products and Enterprise Solutions, and incorporates the organizations unique business rules to the automation of human and system activities.

The automation of business processes ensures that both the system and human centric work is managed, distributed, controlled, and completed in a structured, effective, and efficient manner.  Individual and group tasks are immediately distributed to easily accessible task lists world wide.  Accessing tasks is both easy and flexible with Captaris Workflow because tasks are delivered to a variety of applications. Captaris Workflow tasks lists may be embedded within Microsoft SharePoint, CMS, Outlook, Captaris Workflow Webaccess, a custom designed web portal, or within the Captaris Workflow client. In addition, links to tasks may be inserted into email, delivered to wireless devices, or presented on the desktop by an instant messenger type client.

Deploying and delivering Captaris Workflow functionality in a zero footprint environment provides organizations with flexibility and agility. Workers are able to access and complete tasks with a standard web browser. Web accessible workflow wizards empower workers to build and deploy complete workflow solutions using only a simple web browser. Deployment is simplified and user adoption is fast, with minimal user training.

Captaris Workflow integrates with key Microsoft applications

Captaris Workflow was the first workflow product designed to fully leverage the .NET framework and therefore is able to deeply integrate with Microsoft products. Captaris Workflow offers the complete Captaris Workflow product as well as two fully embedded wizard delivered solutions. The Captaris Workflow Wizard for SharePoint, powered by Teamplate, and the Captaris Workflow Wizard for CMS, powered by Teamplate, provide fully embedded workflow functionality within the context of those products.

Workflow processes are triggered by application centric events associated with the business activity. For example, SharePoint centric document routing and approval workflow could be triggered by the upload of a document to a specific SharePoint folder. When a document is uploaded to a SharePoint site review and approval tasks are automatically assigned to document reviewers, task assignment notifications are emailed out to them, and the work is started. Task lists, document review webforms monitoring views, and workflow wizards are all accessible directly from SharePoint ensuring worker efficiency and rapid adoption with minimal learning curves. Users are able to access workflow tasks and workflow wizard functionality without leaving or logging out of SharePoint or CMS. Automatic task escalation ensures that mission critical or time sensitive tasks are not ignored and are addressed or re-assigned in a timely manner. Service level standards, customer care activities, and sales management activities are all streamlined and automatically managed and tracked to improve organizational responsiveness.

The Captaris Workflow integrated development environment (IDE) makes integration with both SharePoint and CMS easy, but also provides the ability to rapidly integrate with BizTalk, Exchange, MBS products, Office Systems, InfoPath, CRM, ODBC compatible databases, and additional products such as Captaris RightFax. In addition, leveraging connectivity to XML and web services protocols extend integration beyond Microsoft products to existing and future applications.

Using Captaris Workflow for Developing
Captaris Workflow is also easy for developers to use because the Captaris Workflow IDE not only provides a similar functional layout to Visual Studio, but also provides both drag and drop and script editing capabilities. Organizations can build their own re-useable custom actions and import those custom actions into the IDE for access by all developers. InfoPath forms may be imported into the IDE as a resource object and the extracted XML data may be referenced and distributed within a given workflow model. Databases may similarly be referenced and leveraged within Captaris Workflow models. External referencing capability is provided as well as windows and web form designers, auto-binding features, XML referencing, web services connectors, and pre-built custom actions for SharePoint, BizTalk, and Office Systems integration.