Procx Tip #1

When we were building Procx, one of the things we wanted to achieve was to give total control about processes, that businesses could draw their process in a standard way (how business users draw it and understands it) but at the same time, they could create rules, define flow paths and control their business in a deep manner.

When a process is executed, it is usually done in the context of something. Generally, this can be a document, a spreadsheet, a presentation, a form, etc. The most common is a form. These are used through out businesses to represent request from customers and internal employees. It structure information and contains the elements necessary for running the process.

Because of this, we wanted to integrate forms in Procx in a standard way, so information from these forms could be available inside the process and, at the same time, it would be easy for business users to use that information and build processes with it.

That's why we have forms integrated in Procx. In actual version 2.0, you can integrate forms made with Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003, industry standard XForms or any other form that produces a standard XML file. There are certain activities in Procx that will let you consume the fields from these forms and use them in the process. When you do this, they are available for use in the Data Sources browser:

In this figure for example, you can see fields coming from an expense form.

With this you can now build business rules (or policies), use them to send information to other systems (integration) like accounting systems, customer relationship systems, create other documents, etc. You can use them in any activity that supports the use of fields.