Hello UT,

I need information / docs / strategies on data workflow management (or whatever it is called).

We are in the process of building a CRM solution and we want a generic workflow management solution on top of it.
We want to incorporate some business rules in this component.

For example, when we create a new Client, his status must be "Suspect".. When we create an activity, the status
of the client changes to "Initial contact"... When we create a quote, the client status changes to "Prospect".. etc.

So the first goal is to be able to customize and trigger status changes...



Also, we have an incident management module... Every incident must go through a workflow from "Reported" to "Closed"..
The incident is reported
The system notifies some users...
The responsible assigns the incident (bug) to someone
The system notifies the person assigned
The person assigned fix the bug
THe system notifies the testers
The Testers close the incident or reassign it...


So the second goal is a document workflow...with some kind of document approval mechanism....
the user must be able to customize the workflow...

And the last goal is to be able to have a conditional workflow...

For example, I create an activity of type "Phone call client"... depending on the result of the activity, the system
will propose the next activity... if the result is "Client was absent" for example, the next activity must be
"call back in 3 days"... if the result is "Client is interested", the next activity must be "Send documentation by email"
for example...



I know it is quite difficult to incorporate all this in a single strategy... We already brainstormed on this
but we would like to compare our strategy with existing workflow strategies...


Any hints? Doc? Books? URL?

Thank you in advance,

Alex