A workflow is a repeatable process during which documents, information, or tasks are passed from one participant to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules. A participant is a person, machine, or both.
In the Identity Manager, this concept is used to allow workflows to manage user accounts as well as groups and roles. Common activities controlled by workflows include the creation, update, enabling, disabling, and deletion of user accounts.
The workflow engine utilized by OpenIAM is standards based and use BPEL and BPMN.
Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN)
BPMN provides a standardized way of describing a business process. The notation allows for collaboration between business users and IT professionals (common language). BPMN follows the tradition of flowcharting notations for readability, yet still provides a mapping to executable constructs. You can use BPMN to model both the orchestration of web services and the execution of human workflow tasks, while enabling the choreography of multiple business processes through the swimlane metaphor.
Business Process Execution Language (BPEL)
The BPEL 2.0 specification allows users to deploy mission-critical processes on a reliable platform. The worfklow designer simplifies the use of BPEL as it shields developers and workflow designers from the intricacies of BPEL.
