Power Workflows

Many of you value Feng Office Templates a lot. They make work much more efficient and save tons of time. We love and use them a lot too – so we decided to improve them some more. The Power Workflows plugin adds many new possibilities to basic templates configuration.

Important Note: The Power Workflows plugin is only available on the Enterprise and Professional (optional) editions of Feng Office.

You may now set up different kinds of flows upon tasks completion such as the ability to create a task and set its start and due date upon a task completion.

For example, lets say that after you complete an initial task to “Do A”, you want to “Do B”.

So, if you complete the task Do A today, the task Do B has to be automatically created, starting today, and ending in 3 days from today.

This way you can define processes and no longer have to have all the tasks created at the start of your process and then have to worry about adjusting dates. It makes for a much more fluent and efficient flow.

Please note: This will be good for some cases, like service management, but might not be the best way to manage a project if you need to have all the dates for all tasks visible for the project, like in a construction project.

Here is how the variables look like in this example:

On the other hand, one can also set conditions for tasks completions, meaning that the system will not allow users to complete a task if there are empty fields. For instance, a task cannot be completed if it has no description, or any other field you select.

For configuring this, simply edit the desired tasks on the templates setting panel, going to Settings - Templates - Task Templates.

Once on the edition view of the task, go to the Conditional Actions tab and click on Add New Conditional Action. You will see the following options:

• Required Property: Task property to validate before performing the action below.
• Action: Select when the validation will be performed.

Save the changes.

Now, Feng Office lets you define which task template is going to be executed each time you create a client, project, workspace, etc.

For example, lets define a New Project template for project creations:

In the example above, we are defining that, each time a new project is created, it will automatically be assigned with the status “Neutral” and that the template “New Project” will be automatically generated.

What is even more powerful is that, on the workflow tab, we can also define that, each time a project status is changed to “Suspended”, the “Project Suspension Process” will automatically be executed.

So, each time we edit a project and change its status to “Suspended”…

…Voilà. The project suspension template is executed without the need of any additional clicks!