The GroupFlow System: A Scalable Approach to Workflow Management between Cooperation and Automation

In this paper, we will discuss business relevance factors, architectural concepts, tool approaches, and user-interface samples of the GroupFlow environment. GroupFlow offers business process and technology frameworks to set up versatile and flexible workflow systems for distributed information management within organizations and their outside communication partners. We regard the synergetic approaches being used in the GroupFlow architecture, design concepts, and practical implementation for the frontend client-workplaces of the several user typologies as well as for the distributed backend server components as innovative. The GroupFlow environment perhaps best can be profiled around integrating concepts that are typically referred to as workgoup computing or Groupware on the one hand, and workflow management or business process design on the other hand. GroupFlow has been implemented using Lotus Notes as the basic development platform and underlying distributed architecture. The user interfaces on the client sides are either based on Notes-native form and view concepts, or developed using several other graphical frontend tools when appropriate for the respective user tasks to be performed. On the backend server side of GroupFlow, solely Notes technology has been used for data repositories of the actual business information content, for the workflow structure parts, and the various workflow runtime engines supporting processes like messaging, replication, event management or gateway connections. Due to the open architecture of Notes, the backend server side has to be considered completely open for realtime interconnection of data sets being managed in transaction systems, or external processes to be initiated and controlled in an open client server environment.