workflow rule

Workflow rules provide the individual steps and services -- such as email notification, data update, and status update -- that an organization can tie together to reflect a particular workflow at their organization. For example, a workflow for managing requested maintenance issues may have workflow rules for notifying a requestor that maintenance work has been rejected and for changing work request status.

Workflow rules speed communication flow between work groups, reduce administrative errors, eliminate follow-up communication, document how a job is executed, and ensure consistency among an organization’s departments and sites. The rules can be modified to suit an organization’s particular needs, accelerate the organization's processes, and enforce an organization’s procedures and business rules

Archibus provides two types of workflow rules:

• Message rule. This kind of rule is run in response to a user action (such as clicking a button on a form), which creates an XML action message that the client workstation submits to the server.
• Scheduled rule. This kind of rule is run on a predetermined interval (every hour, every Monday and Tuesday at 1:00 am, etc.).  It is run by the application itself. Scheduled rules run repeat reminders, data transfers, benchmark calculations, and other actions that should be performed at specified intervals.

Typically, an Add-In Manager defines workflow rules. Process Managers can then edit, activate, and deactivate workflow rules using the System / Add-In Manager tasks.