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What is actually a workflow (in terms of standards or definitions)? Every one who can tell one definition by heart, gets a free beer from me. Come on. You have 30 seconds to think. Is it a business process or a work process description? What about activities, participants and automatisation?
If that was a peace of cake for you, here is another quiz: Can you tell me the meaning of following acronyms: BPM, WfMC, WML, Petri-Net, BPMI, BPMN, Wf-XML, UML, XPDL, YAWL, OASIS, OMG, WPS, ITIL? Are these standards description languages or organisations?
Not that easy, isn't it?
There are many organisations and standards which try to define a workflow. Microsoft uses the similar approach ("make your own definition" ;-) with the windows workflow foundation:
A workflow is a set of activities stored as a model which describe a real world process.
This definition tries to reflect the actual role of a WWF as a framework and an API for developing the workflow centric applications, however this might not be always the definition which all the people are accustomed to. This can lead to several misunderstandings, as I realized today after speaking about the windows workflow foundation in front of a very heterogeneous audience…
[1] www.bpmi.org
[2] www.wfmc.org
[3] www.windowsworkflow.net
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