Captaris Workflow - Development

Captaris Workflow supports users with a variety of technical skill levels contributing to the same workflow solution. Non-technical knowledge workers can configure workflow solutions through wizards or use the complete integrated development environment (IDE) to intuitively design workflow solutions. For detailed development of complex, highly integrated workflows, developers and workflow model design engineers use the Captaris Workflow IDE, a powerful development environment modeled on Visual Studio.

Captaris Workflow also provides a library of re-usable drag and drop custom actions that can be incorporated into workflow solutions to automate routine tasks, speeding time to delivery and reducing overall development costs.

Captaris Workflow provides the ability to collaborate among multiple subject matter and domain experts. Many organizations find that the best workflow models are based on input from multiple concerned constituents. Typically workflow model developers are comfortable with the workflow designer, but are not familiar with the nuances of the specific business process undergoing automation. Subject model experts understand the individual business process but are not workflow developers and are not comfortable using the complete development environment. Captaris Workflow provides two ways to address this issue. Captaris Workflow supports importing Visio diagrams into the Captaris Workflow IDE. This allows business analysts and process owners to collaborate around a Visio diagram and then forward the diagram to the model developers for import and design. In addition, Captaris Workflow provides workflow wizards to help non-technical workers to build and deploy simple workflow designs without any coding or programming. Once the core workflow has been designed by the wizard it can then be accessed by model developers within the full development environment for model enhancement and expansion.

Wizards
Captaris Workflow brings the power of wizards to workflow, making it possible for non-technical knowledge workers or managers to set up and deploy automated workflow solutions.

Workflow wizards are used to quickly stitch together sequential or parallel tasks into simple workflows. Workflow models designed with wizards can be further customized using the Captaris Captaris Workflow IDE. The IDE uses sophisticated design wizards and drag and drop capabilities increase the speed and accuracy of work performed by developers thereby further lowering the cost of implementing workflow automation.
The Captaris Workflow Wizard for CMS and Captaris Workflow Wizard for SharePoint, both powered by Teamplate, enable rapid creation of workflow extensions to those products.

IDE
Captaris Workflow provides a powerful, high productivity integrated development environment patterned after Microsoft Visual Studio for .NET. 

Developers can open an existing wizard built or IDE designed model, start with a blank canvas, or drag in a Visio diagram to kick-start development. The IDE provides a full set of reusable actions and robust tools to increase development speed and accuracy, even when building out the most complex workflows.
As developers create the workflow by dragging and dropping objects, VB.NET script is automatically being generated. Although not generally required, direct script editing with built-in intellisense scripting support is available, for ultimate flexibility.
Captaris Workflow also provides unique, high productivity databinding capabilities, and automatic XML based form generation, to automate the process of linking forms to XML data and database queries, further increasing developer productivity and reducing overall costs of deployment.

Custom Actions
Captaris Workflow provides an extensible library of re-usable Custom Actions that can be incorporated into workflow solutions.

Captaris Workflow includes a collection of commonly used actions, generating a Microsoft Word document, scheduling a meeting, sending Email, interoperating with Microsoft Biztalk Server, and accessing and updating SharePoint. Companies and software vendors can create additional Custom Actions for use within the Captaris Workflow IDE to include a variety of workflow or application integration capabilities, so that Captaris Workflow users can incorporate functionality specific to a given organization or vertical market as re-usable components within workflow solutions.

Captaris Workflow Custom Actions also provide a powerful, easy to use mechanism to access functionality in other software applications, reducing overall cost of integration and accelerating development time.