Re: OGo/Plone integration

On Jun 4, 2004, at 15:43, Michael Brown wrote:
> Seriously though, workflow (business process, document
> flow, whatever) is common everywhere in business, and
> it would be good if OGo had some sort of more advanced
> version of business logic available.  In documents, at
> the least there is Create -> Submit ->
> Review{Approve/Reject} -> Publish (like the OGo
> plone).

Like in tasks which also has a small builtin workflow. I'm asking for 
specific use cases which illustrate how the "workflow feature" would be 
used. If it near a builtin workflow, there is no point in providing a 
freely customizable one.

> In the company I used to work for (5k people
> on campus) there were hundreds of documents being
> used/worked on at any one time.  There was an
> electronic document review process (workflow) that
> notified the signoff "committee" as to the state of
> documents (pending review, pending acceptance, etc)
> and the signoff status of each member, working towards
> final approval by the lead.  That kind of thing...

Yes, this makes sense in the document management context and CMF 
provides that. Ergo: we need Zope/OGo integration ;-)
Well, actually writing a workflow system is not particulary difficult, 
but (pretty much like forms!), I have some doubts that this is actually 
worth the effort and employed in practice (*except* for pretty big 
customers!). As an example I'm pretty sure that 95% of the Plone 
installations use the predefined Plone workflow and do no modifications 
at all on it.

>> OGo _has_ group permissions for almost all objects
>> in OGo. We miss roles, especially for administration.
> Roles would be handy.  That way you could have stuff
> like "signoff_required", "Manager", "Owner", etc.  and
> have that part of the workflow system as well as
> overall OGo system administration & permission
> structure.

Overly complicated. Few people will use (and understand) such a system. 
Not that it doesn't sound cool ;-)

In practice the groupware objects are quite different from "documents" 
in a CMS and all have some builtin workflow and semantics. You can't 
really apply generic workflow logic on those objects (eg Notes Workflow 
is seldom applied to contact or calendar databases, but almost 
exclusively for custom applications!).

> OK... then maybe could there be a stripped down
> version of a WO extension plugin that people could use
> as a template to create new modules?  If we had a well
> documented "Module starter Kit", that could encourage
> more developer involvement.

There are some examples in OpenGroupware.org/Misc. And remember not to 
ask for documentation ;-)

Greets,
   Helge
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