The Problem
I was asked the other day to create a workflow that would send end users ‘formatted’ emails on a schedule (1 per day for 3 days). This is a process that people currently are spending a lot of time doing manually and is a perfect candidate for automation with Opalis (very low hanging fruit).
The Solution
Create a very basic UI (this will probably be upgraded later to have more error checking) and 3 Opalis workflows. The input UI is a basic forms based applet that creates a file on an NTFS network share. We created 4 folders on a network share which we will call, for the purposes of this blog post:
The UI creates a file in the ‘Day1Email’ folder
From here on out it the solution is crafted with 3 (Very Similar) Opalis workflows.
Workflow One
The monitoring policy for this workflow constantly is polling the file share for ‘Day 1′. When a newly created request is found it is parsed and the relevant information is sent to the worker policy which sends the user an email and moves the request to the ‘Day 2′ folder.
Schedule
The next two workflows only should be executed Monday -> Friday. To enable this we setup a ‘schedule’
Workflow 2
The monitor policy for this workflow triggers at 7am every day. The first thing it does it check to see if it is inside the correct schedule (Monday -> Friday), if it is it then polls the ‘Day 2′ folder for people to send ‘Day 2′ emails to. For each one it finds it triggers the worker policy which sends HTML formatted emails and moves the request to the ‘Day 3′ Folder
Workflow 3
The monitor policy for this workflow triggers at 7am every day. The first thing it does it check to see if it is inside the correct schedule (Monday -> Friday), if it is it then polls the ‘Day 3′ folder for people to send ‘Day 3′ emails to. For each one it finds it triggers the worker policy which sends HTML formatted emails and moves the request to the ‘Finished’ Folder. This workflow is almost identical to Workflow 2 with the exception of the file share it checks and the body of the email it sends.
Summary
These are 3 very simple workflows that replace a very time consuming manual process. These are the types of ‘low hanging fruit’ scenarios that we love to automate inside of Opalis.
