A workflow system for supporting group activities of an enterprise

Workflow technology provides a good way to mediate the flow of responsibility in a business process from person to person and from task to task. However, most current workflow systems are not able to do this very well. The main reasons are: (1) most activities of a workflow are executed asynchronously and respectively according to their workflow model, and cannot be executed synchronously; (2) external groupware tools cannot be integrated very well, which makes the system not the best at supporting human-human synchronous interactions. CFlow (cooperative workflow) has been developed by our group recently to overcome the above shortcomings. In this paper, the main implementation techniques of CFlow are described, a process model visually describing a method based on constraints is introduced, and an approach to integrate groupware tools is presented