(Feb 2009) ProcessMaker test drive
Workfow tools are essential to easily model any business process. Workflow tools avoid document templates and endless email exchanges between the parties of a process.
After several days of browsing over different tools available on the market i came across the ProcessMaker application.
Besides being OpenSource which is a big plus it also offer lots of functionalities, a user interface that is quite friendly and additionally quite complete documentation.
From the installation to the configuration and creation of a first test workflow it takes about one hour. The installer creates its own application stack including Apache server and MySql Database server. The configuration is also extremly simple , having the administrator just to create some users and usergroups.
The User interface is very powerful and quite simple to use. However it may not work very well with all browsers. Following the tutorials that come with the product and going through the examples that can be installed very easly we can quickly have a overview of the potential of the application.
For the Business model that i was trying to implement there was just one minor problem. In a work flow a task could only be assigned to a single user instead to a group where all member could eventually take action. This can be worked arround by creating distribution list emails corresponding to the groups but it is not very clean and may be very complicated when several BP run on the tool with different user groups and roles that are overlapping or not.
The design team of the project seemed very active and continually improve their product. For instance a solution for the problem i described above was planned for a next release)
Overall this is a platform to keep in mind.
