Workflow and RSS

An interesting idea:

Workflow Feeds with RSS and Atom
(Clint Combs)

Most people use RSS feeds for reading weblogs or downloading podcasts, but I'm experimenting with other uses. I've started integrating RSS feeds into a Java-based workflow application and the results look promising.

...

Since I rolled this out it's had a big impact on how I use the system. Every morning I fire up RSSOwl and leave it running throughout the day. I've configured RSSOwl to poll the feed once an hour. Whenever it finds a new job note in the feed it alerts me and displays the new notes with bold headers. While it's not an immediate sort of prompt (the system can also e-mail and page people) it does provide a great way to organize the ad-hoc data contained in the notes.

The reader shows every note and keeps track of the notes I have and haven't read. If the note requires more attention I simply click on the link to the job and RSSOwl displays the OSCAR job in a browser window. This sort of interaction draws my immediate attention to notes and lets me forget about them as soon as I'm finished dealing with them. This is exactly the kind of user experience that a workflow solution should provide.

This little personal experiment has been a great success and I'm looking to roll it out to other users and see how they like it. The biggest task remaining is to get RSS readers into the hands of end users. While RSSOwl has worked fine for me, the developer, it's probably not the best solution for enterprise office workers and print machine operators. I'm looking for a simpler solution.

(via CMS Watch)

Having worked on designing a couple systems that had workflow as a feature (and being in the middle of some workflow feature documentation right now) I can definately see where having workflow task listings distributed by RSS could be cool. Definately rpeferable to email. But as was mentioned in the article, the problem is most people don't have RSS readers, and would be confused by them if they did.

Email notification is almost a non-starter. It is usally offered because people getting workflow systems insist that it has to be there. But almost always the requests to please turn that notification off start coming in almost immediately. So far the prefered solution has been a web based "to do list" that a user would check in on periodically. Even with that solution, RSS might be a good method of communicating the task lists on the back end from the system that generates them to the systems that shows the to do list.

But providing the task list as an RSS opens up a number of possibilities. Not just your standard reader, but also tickers and the like. Definately interesting possibilities.

The difficulty is just in productizing it without introducing the complexity of additional software to learn or install to non-tech users. Greg is considering a similar problem relating to get a potentially good Wiki based solution for sharing notes in an academic setting. As with a lot of these sorts of things, the technical aspects of the problem often end up being dwarfed by the cultural and social parts of the problem.

	Abulsme - Wed, 15 Jun 2005, 17:09:25 UTC - Tech
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Book: Blue-Toungued Skinks

Author: Jerry Walls
Started: 30 May 2005
Finished: 14 Jun 2005
64 p / 16 d
4 p/d

The last skink book I read was just about skinks in general. This skink book is about the kind of skink Mike is. (Scroll down to see him on that link.) It still covers a veriety of sub-types of skink, but all in the same basic group as Mike.

Things I learned: Mike will need a bigger tank soon. The one we have right now is at about the lower limit given how he has been growing. He also would probably like it if we had his tank slightly hotter than we do. Where it is is OK, but he might not mind even warmer. By just a tad. Mike is very tame, and likes to be hand fed, but could probably use a bit more actual handling than we have been giving him lately (hey, we've been busy!) so as to further develop his personality.

The book also had a few things to say about breeding skinks, but I don't think we will be going there.

	Abulsme - Wed, 15 Jun 2005, 16:26:42 UTC - Book
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