How can an APS user set themselves as Unavailable

[pedwards99]

Hi there,

Does anyone know how a user can set themselves as unavailable/out-of-office and have tasks routed to another user/group?

Surely this must be possible?

Thanks

Paul

[pault]

I don't think there is anything in the Activiti engine. The Identity Service is quite simple as the user guide says :

"The IdentityService is pretty simple. It allows the management (creation, update, deletion, querying, …) of groups and users. It is important to understand that Activiti actually doesn’t do any checking on users at runtime. For example, a task could be assigned to any user, but the engine does not verify if that user is known to the system. This is because the Activiti engine can also be used in conjunction with services such as LDAP, Active Directory, etc."

From past experience of building a workflow application, albeit using a different BPM technology, we had to build that into the application. In the process definition you can assign to candidate users, and groups, rather than an individual user, and then a suitably qualified user can claim the task when they are available, or it can be allocated by a supervisor who knows who is available. Issues can arise if a user doesn't complete an allocated task and then goes 'unavailable'. If that can happen and create an issue then you need some way of an admin being able to release and/or reallocate it as well. 

[pedwards99]

Thanks Paul,

It does annoy me that Alfresco seem to produce products without stopping to think about the real world scenarios their products are likely to be used in.

I take your point about allocating tasks to a group, but in this particular situation we need to avoid that. It's an insurance claims handling process. In order to provide their customers with great experience, the insurer wants to allocate a claims handler. Any inbound communication regarding the claim should always be routed to the same handler except when that handler is on holiday or is going to be off-sick for 

[pault]

There is the ability to transfer / re-assign tasks of course, just nowhere to set an 'out of office' status that I have seen. I'm only working with the open source Activiti engine, I guess there could be something more in the commercial APS offering ?

[pedwards99]

Nothing more that I can see unfortunately.

Thanks

Paul