Event Triggering of BPM processes

[Martyn Houghton]

It would be really useful to be able to trigger a BPM flow from an event, similar to the Support Works VPME Call Action Events, so that you can setup processes outside the main request process which happen when a certain event occurs.

For example when an request is updated via the customer/service portal, you could trigger a BPM process to check the request status, if is on hold, create an task/activity for the owner or 1st Tier team to review the update and determine if the request needs to be taken off hold.

Is this something that is being considered?

Cheers

Martyn

[Gerry]

Hi Martyn,

I think what you are asking for is something similar to what VPME in Supportworks could do? The BPM is not designed for doing functional logic, its designed for a very different purpose and we have done everything we can to make it as non-technical as possible so business users are able to work with it. On the Hornbill platform the equivalent to VPME would be WebHooks, conceptually very similar to VPME except the evens would be invoking some code that runs on one of your own servers. Are WebHooks something you have considered using?

Gerry

[Gerry]

Martyn,

I should have mentioned... in the spirit of being transparent, under the hood we do actually have something very similar to VPME, we cal it Flowcode and its essentially a graphical interface for drawing our functional logic flows, this is what is under the hood that make the BPM work, all of the functional nodes you can invoke are actually Flowcodes which are developed by the application team. It is not possible to let individual customers edit/add to these because we would not be able to update our customers instances if we did.

Gerry

[Martyn Houghton]

Gerry

Web hooks is something we are considering for as you say for triggering actions to happen on a external server, which could indeed use the the API to call back to the application to trigger a task or update the request etc. However as you say this not aimed at the normal non-technical user.

Would it worth adding Webhooks and API as separate forums under the System Administration for those of use who will be using them to add questions and information into?

Cheers

Martyn

[Gerry]

Martyn,

Good call, added. https://forums.hornbill.com/index.php?showforum=132

Gerry

[Steven Boardman]

Hi Martyn

Just to add to this, we do have a development we will be starting shortly which will allow you to define custom / sub statuses per request type per service, against these you will be able to define actions such as, if the request is updated from self service that the request can be automatically moved into another of your custom sub statuses, with other notification options - now this does not go as far as creating a task for the owner to do something, but the configurable status changes I would suggest from something like With Customer to Awaiting Owner Action would help a little,. There is more depth to this particular development, around interactions with the pausing of timers, but I thought it might help to give you some visibility of this planned change as it was an example you cited in the initial post.

Thanks

Steve

[Martyn Houghton]

Steve

Thanks, I think that would help quite a bit with indicating to the request owner that some action is required or can be picked up by a report/board for 1st Tier to follow up etc. I suspect it would also be useful where you want to managed escalations/condition of the request, which does not necessarily change the SLA priority but flags the request in a different status.

Cheers

Martyn