Completing work on tasks in the Work dashboard

The Work dashboard lists the tasks that you own and the tasks that are assigned to your team, which you can claim to work on. Open a task to claim it and complete the work that is needed.
Tip: To improve your efficiency working with the tasks in your task list, you can use the task prioritization function to sort your task list based on skill and performance. To gain programmatic control over the sorting and filtering of your task list, enable the task filter service, which ensures that the default template service flow uses the task prioritization function. For more information, see Enabling Intelligent Task Prioritization.

Task list refresh behavior

To display the latest task updates, task lists in Process Portal are automatically refreshed without user interaction. Depending on how Process Portal is configured, the behavior of the task list refresh may vary. By default, your list of tasks is automatically refreshed in the following situations:

Nonfederated environments
  • New tasks are added to the list.
  • A task that is assigned to your team is claimed.
  • The due date of a task is changed.
Restriction: The described task list refresh behavior might not occur in the case of tasks that use ad hoc task assignment when the task is assigned to a newly initialized ad hoc group.
Federated environments
The list is refreshed every 60 seconds.
There are other factors that can change the default refreshing behavior of the task list.
Saved search task list with full text search
Task lists that are implemented using a saved search and use a full text search are populated using the Process Portal Lucene search index, rather than by querying the database. The saved searches automatically refresh after a short delay, when an update that triggers a task list refresh occurs. The amount of time of the delay, which corresponds to the value of taskIndexUpdateInterval, is by default 5 seconds.
Delayed automatic refresh of the task list
If your system administrator configures a delay of the task list automatic refresh, when updates are available to the list, the refresh is delayed by the configured delay time. Configuring a refresh delay prevents each individual update from triggering a task list refresh, which reduces the load on the database required to refresh the list. Any updates that occur during the delayed period do not trigger additional refreshes. If a full text search is used, the delay defaults to the value of the taskIndexUpdateInterval value instead of the delay value that was set by the administrator.
Disabled automatic refresh of the task list
If your system administrator disabled the automatic refresh of task lists, the Work dashboard and saved search task lists do not refresh automatically. In this case, if updates to the page are available, you are prompted to get the latest changes. To manually refresh the task lists, you must click the new link that appears in Process Portal.

Working with tasks

To see more information about a task, such as the data relevant to the task, click the task icon. If the task can be completed directly from the Work dashboard, this information is displayed too. To complete the work on all other tasks, open a task by clicking the task name.

When you open a task that is assigned to a team, you can claim it. By default, you receive a confirmation message that the task is assigned to you. You can turn off these messages from the confirmation window or by changing your user preferences. If you claim a task by mistake, you can reassign it back to the designated team.

While you work on a task, the following information is available to you from the context menu.
Table 1. Working on tasks in Process Portal
Tab Description
Details Provides information about the process instance that the task belongs to. The information includes business data, for example, the customer name, a link to the process instance details, a list of the completed tasks, and the tasks that are in progress. You can follow the process instance from this tab. If you are authorized, you can also act on the process instance by clicking the instance name.
Experts Shows the experts that are defined for the task that you are working on. You can directly interact with the people shown here so that you can complete your work more efficiently.
An expert can be either an experienced user or a subject matter expert. Depending on how Process Portal is set up, you might not see an Experienced Users section.
Experienced users
Experienced users are selected by the system based on the number of tasks of the same type that they previously completed. For example, at the time you opened the Experts tab, the system found three users who previously completed one or more of the same task type, such as the Loan-Approve-or-Reject task, within the same process, such as the Loan-Approval process. The list is empty when the system cannot find any users who previously completed this task type.
Subject matter experts
Subject matter experts are designated by your team and manually defined in the system for specific task types. If this feature is not configured on your system, the list is empty.
Stream Shows the activity on the process instance, such as when a task was claimed, or completed; and the posted comments on the instance or the tasks that belong to it. You can post new comments here on the instance or on the task that you are working on.

For the task started and claimed stream entries, the time stamp indicates when the task was started or claimed; the assigned group or user is the currently assigned task owner rather than the task owner when the task was started or claimed.

If you are authorized, you can perform other actions on tasks in the Work page by clicking the task icon.