Developing flexible and efficient process applications

After you have mapped out your process to include all of the normal task flows for normal process execution, you can optimize your process to make it more flexible and efficient for the business users who will be working with the application in Process Portal.

• If your process includes user tasks that involve a simple decision, such as to approve or reject a request or to choose between a set of options, you can design the task so that the business user can complete it in Process Portal without having to open the coach for the task. Instead, the user clicks a button or chooses between the options with a single click.
• If your process must have a low latency, for example, to achieve a business service level agreement, you can enable the optimization of execution for latency. This optimization means that one path through the process is performed using a single thread on a cluster member, other paths are scheduled to use the default shared pool of threads.
• Sometimes multiple sequential tasks in a process are assigned to the same user. In Process Designer, you can configure individual activities to launch automatically if they are assigned to the same person as the previous task. In Process Portal, if the owner of the first task is the same as the owner of the second, the second task will launch automatically when the first task is complete.
• Not all process activities run predictably in each execution of a process. Sometimes a user must launch a new task that is outside of the normal process flow. For example, they might need to cancel the process or they might need to complete a separate but related business action, such as updating customer contact information. Ad hoc processes are actions that you can expect users to do at some point during at least some process instances. You can add ad hoc start events and subsequent activities to your process, and the business user is able to launch the ad hoc process from the Process Portal environment.