I have been dabbling with "Workflow" for ~ 15 years now, using various products and am very excited that MS has finally gotten a product to market that is not wrapped by BizTalk etc...
Given my background, I was hoping to find some resource that did some kind of high level comparison to the products I am already very familiar with.
Can anyone on here point me to some resources that might do just that Essentially I am very familiar with the concepts and architectures behind ViewStar(Global 360) and FileNet, so anything that draws comparisons against these will be invaluable!
Thanks,
Dave
High Level Product Comparison
maest
Thanks for the follow up Paul. And sorry for the very delayed response (familly emergency :-()
After spending some time reading the "Essential Windows Workflow Foundation" book and tinkering around with many examples I am starting to see just how low level this stuff is. My original approach was to see how WF managed functionality I was used to in other Workflow "products" but as this is not a product, just a foundation/toolkit, what I really need to do is to see how I can build up my own toolkit to acheive the functionality I need.
My biggest area of confusion right now is how to manage queuing - I am building, what I class as "Enterprise" workflows, so "work" will transition between various teams of people for the acttivities of that group to be fullfilled. Persistence is pretty stratight forward, but selection of "persisted" work does not seem to be so easy Guess I'll figure it out eventually.
Thanks,
Dave
ahmedilyas
Hi Dave,
We built WF because it was identified that there are many products at Microsoft that have a process engine and rules enging of some sort. It appeard to be a solved problem that we could build once and have many people use it. So that's what we built, the engine (or foundation) for building workflow or other process applications on. Microsoft has a couple of workflow products in BizTalk Server and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server that are using or planning to use WF and we have a number of other products that have announced plans to use WF.
The same quesiton you ask about ViewStar and FileNet compared to WF could be asked about these Microsoft products. So what you're really asking is how does WF compare to products that are built with it. And there's your answer. WF is the programming model, engine and tools for building workflow enabled applications. It provides what developers need in a process and rules execution environment so that they can built it into their applications.
Remember that it's a foundation and you still have to build a software product on top of it to provide business value to end customers. WF features focusses on what developers need in a workflow and rules engine. We avoided implementing features that we either considered weren't solved problems such that they could be implemented multiple ways with no clear best alternative. We also avoided implementing features for non-developers, things that IT Administrators need, things that business analysts need or end users. Those features are often vertical specific and we left them for the developers using WF as part of their softwareproducts.
You can summarise this comparison as build versus buy. WF makes it easier to build workflow enabled software but if you're looking for a product to directly deploy for a customer you should buy some software.
Feel free to follow up with any further questions of this sort.
Regards,
Paul