Workflow & Data List - Difference

[mahesh_alfresco]

Hi all members,

First, i would like to thank all members for sharing their valuable suggestion and experiences.

Now my query:

What is the actual difference between Workflow and data list.

In "data list" i am seeing various activities like "To Do List/Advance Task List" where there is also option for adding due date, priority and assignee.

It sounds similar to Workflow.

When to use DataLists


Can you guide.


Regards


Mahesh

[mitpatoliya]

Datalists you need to use when you want to create list of perticular type of objects.
For example Phone Book type contact list, Team Members list, Task to do List. you can say collection of objects which share common set of properties.

Where as on other side Workflows are meant for leveraging business processes. Where there is certain process which involves various stages of approval and processing of content.

Hope this gives you some insight.

[parzgnat]

Mits is correct.  To further elaborate, the Datalist functionality in Alfresco Share is basically an online table of data that users can add to and update based depending on their permissions in the site.  One of the options in creating datalists is to create a To Do list where you can assign tasks to different users.

Workflow is completely different.  When a user is assigned a new workflow task, an item will appear in the users "My Tasks" dashlet.  Users can click on these tasks to perform different actions depending on which workflow template was used (review documents, approve documents, accept an invitation to a site).  Alfresco provides some useful workflow templates out of the box, including Adhoc Workflow, Group Review and Approve, etc.  These merely scratch the surface of what you're able to do with workflow in Alfresco.  Based on your business process, you can create custom workflow templates to fit your business process.  For example, if you have a 10 step approval process for certain documents in your system, you can create a template to control this process, the order of the approvals, who approves, and whether or not the approvals occur in parallel or serially.

[robm]

Hi there,

Firstly it seems confusing and somewhat redundant to have tasks in a list and task in a workflow. There is an overlap. Neverthless it is as it is.

I wanted to know if there is some process for defining workflows - as in graphical that does not involve learning a whole new coding framework and writing workflows in code. I'm relatively new to Alfresco and I think its fantastic but it seems there is very little that is configurable in the community version that does not involve editing configuration files or writing code or scripts.

Rob