Framework to model and execute business processes within a collaborative environment

• US 7,386,797 B1
• Filed: 05/22/2002
• Issued: 06/10/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 05/22/2002
• Status: Expired due to Term

• Current Assignee: Oracle International Corporation (Oracle Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Oracle Corporation
• Inventors: Dhuleshia, Amit, Chatterjee, Raja
• Primary Examiner(s): Lo; Weilun
• Assistant Examiner(s): Theriault; Steven B.
• Application Number:
  US10/154,152
• Time in Patent Office: 2,211 Days
• Field of Search: 700/100, 707/10, 707/100, 707/103, 705/2, 705/8, 705/1, 715/500, 715/751, 715/864, 715/229, 715/759, 715/965, 718/102
• US Class Current: 715/751
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/06 Resources, workflows, human or project management; Enterprise or organisation planning; Enterprise or organisation modelling
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/10 Office automation; Time management
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/103 Workflow collaboration or project management
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 715/965 for process control and configuration

Abstract

A mechanism of specification of business process templates, to capture commonly performed business activities/workflows/projects within a business organization and encourage reuse of best practices. Long transaction workspaces based business process template execution mechanism are presented, which have several advantages over existing business process execution mechanisms in web collaboration frameworks. This execution approach provides support for an isolated environment for business process execution. This isolates the changes made on different resources while executing a business process from the external world until the business process completes. It enables the ability to concurrently manipulate same resources in different components of a business process, and later resolve conflicts if any and merge the different views of the same resource manipulated by different components of a business process. It also enables easy and effective mechanisms for error recovery and rollback during business process execution.

Claims

1. A method of executing a project within a collaborative environment in a relational database system comprising:

creating at least one task type, each task type modeling a task in a business process;

creating at least one tasklist template, each tasklist template comprising an ordered set of task types connected to each other via task associations;

detecting an occurrence of a tasklist trigger event of a child project;

associating a task list template with each child project of the project template corresponding to a resource associated with the tasklist trigger event;

automatically invoking execution of the tasklist template;

creating a parent workspace in the system for executing the parent project and at least one child workspace in the system for each child project of the parent project as defined by the task list template, wherein each child workspace is isolated from the parent workspace and configured to operate on data content of the parent workspace concurrently with any other child workspace and independently of any other child workspace;

executing each task type of each child project defined by the task list template in a respective child project task workspace each task type being executed in an isolated environment independent of any other task type;

merging data content of each child project task workspace back to the child project workspace at any point during execution of a respective task;

making the data content of each task workspace merged back to the child project workspace from which the task was created visible to all other child workspaces of the child project workspace at the time the data content is merged; and

merging a content of each child workspace back to the parent workspace in the system.

2. The method of claim 1 further comprising after executing each child project task:

executing, if any, each subsequent child project of each preceding child project in a respective subsequent child workspace, wherein activities of each subsequent child project continue concurrently in an isolated environment;

executing remaining subsequent child projects in a similar fashion along a hierarchical chain of preceding projects and subsequent projects until all subprojects of the parent project are executed; and

merging each subsequent child workspace in the hierarchical chain back to a respective preceding workspace, wherein changes in each subsequent child workspace are visible in the preceding project workspace, the step of merging continuing until each child workspace is merged into the parent workspace.

3. The method of claim 1 further comprising, after execution of each child project of the parent project, creating a save-point in each respective child workspace corresponding to an executed version of each child project, wherein a user can roll back to any save-point during execution of the project in order to bring project data to a consistent state.

4. The method of claim 1 further comprising creating a save-point during each project execution allowing a user to roll back to a previously created save-point to bring project data to a consistent state.

5. The method of claim 4 further comprising rolling back data and resources of the child workspace to a state of a save-point that was previously created.

6. The method of claim 1 wherein creating a parent workspace or child workspace further comprises granting read/write privileges on each created workspace and on data elements of each workspace to at least one user responsible for executing the project.

7. The method of claim 1 wherein executing each subsequent child project further comprises granting new workspace and data item privileges to users of the subsequent child project.

8. The method of claim 1 wherein creating a child workspace further comprises:

defining a project type in order to create a instance of the project type; and

beginning the project instance, including changing a status of the project to STARTED.

9. The method of claim 1 wherein creating a child project task workspace for each child project of the parent project further comprises;

determining if any of each child project is a compound project, wherein each compound project includes sub-projects; and

creating another workspace for each sub-project of each compound project, wherein a hierarchy of workspaces is created to execute a hierarchical compound project.

10. The method of claim 1 further comprising:

determining, after merging, if the data content operated on in one child project task was also modified in a sibling child project task, wherein a conflict resolution is performed on a content of the child workspace;

freezing the child workspace so no more work can be done in that project; and

changing a status of the project to reflect that the project is ENDED.

11. The method of claim 1 wherein the project includes one or more tasklists, and wherein each tasklist can be adapted to be executed within the project.

21. The method of claim 1 further comprising, when the child project begins, refreshing data related to the task from the parent project to the child project, the refreshed data including changes received by the parent workspace from each child workspace that has merged to the parent workspace.

22. The method of claim 1 further comprising merging each child workspace back to the parent workspace at any point in time during execution of the child project in the child workspace.

23. The method of claim 1 further comprising merging one child workspace back to the parent workspace independently of any other child workspace.

24. The method of claim 1 further comprising merging at least one child workspace back to the parent workspace and refreshing the at least one child workspace with data from the parent workspace when execution on the at least one child workspace resumes, the data from the parent workspace including changes received from other executing child workspaces that have merged back to the parent workspace.

25. The method of claim 1 further comprising:

intermittently merging data content from the at least one child workspace back to the parent workspace during execution of the project in the at least one child workspace prior to completion of the respective child project; and

refreshing data from the parent workspace to the at least one child workspace prior to resuming execution of the at least one child workspace, the refreshed data including at least partially completed results received from at least one other child workspace that has merged its data content back to the parent workspace.

26. The method of claim 1 further comprising executing each task by;

determining a type of a current task to be executed;

if the current task is not a compound task, executing a specified procedure for the current task in a current task workspace; and

if the current task is a compound task, activate a first level child task by creating a sub-workspace for each first level child task where each first level child task will be executed, each sub-workspace configured to operate on common data elements of the data content in an independent and isolated environment.

27. The method of claim 26 further comprising:

determining if a next task to be executed is a sequential task, and if so, creating a savepoint for the current task being ended in the current task workspace; and

determining if the current task being ended is a parallel task, and if so, merging the ended current task in the sub-workspace back to the child project task workspace.

28. The method of claim 1 wherein the parent workspace is geographically dispersed from the child workspace, each child workspace is geographically dispersed from any other child workspace.

29. The method of claim 1 wherein the parent and child workspaces are accessible in an online environment.

30. The method of claim 1 wherein changes made to data content in each child-project task workspace are not visible to other users of the data content until the data content from a respective child project task workspace is published from the respective child project task workspace to the child workspace.

31. The method of claim 1 further comprising that each child workspace is configured to operate on data content from the parent workspace, wherein the data content being operated on in each child workspace is the same data content.

32. The method of claim 1 wherein the data content is relational database content.

33. The method of claim 1 further comprising refreshing content on demand or periodically from the parent project workspace to the child project workspace at anytime during a lifetime of the child project.

34. The method of claim 1 further comprising refreshing content on demand or periodically from the parent project workspace to the child task workspace at anytime during a lifetime of the child task.

35. The method of claim 1 further comprising:

defining at least one project/task template;

defining a triggering event to automatically invoke application of the at least one project/task template; and

automatically executing the at least one project/task template in a respective workspace when the triggering event occurs.

36. The method of claim 35 further comprising automatically creating a project/task workspace corresponding to the at least one project/task template in response to the triggering event.

38. The method of claim 1 wherein the task type comprises a task name, a task description and task data and resources which need to be operated on inside the task.

12. A system comprising:

at least one processor for modeling and executing tasklists within a collaborative environment in a database system

a workspace manager in the at least one processor configured to support workspaces in the database system for performing tasks and create a child workspace for each child project;

a tasklist template manager in the at least one processor configured to model at least one tasklist, wherein each tasklist comprises one or more tasks to be performed in workspaces, each workspace configured to be isolated and independent from any other workspace; and

a tasklist manager in the at least one processor configured to detect an occurrence of a tasklist trigger event of a child project, associate a stored tasklist template with the child project, and automatically invoke execution of the stored tasklist template using a set of workspaces in the database system, wherein the tasklist manager is configured to create a task workspace in the workspace manager for each task in the tasklist as modeled by the tasklist template and wherein the tasklist manager provides an isolated environment for task execution by executing each task within a respective task workspace and publishing data content of each task to the child workspace from the respective task workspace at any point during execution of the task, where any other task created within the child workspace can view data content published to the child workspace.

13. The system of claim 12 wherein when the tasklist manager creates a task workspace, the tasklist manager is adapted to grant read/write privileges on the workspace and on data elements of the workspace to users responsible for executing the task.

14. The system of claim 12 wherein the workspace manager is adapted to support a creation of save-points that can be used to roll back to a previous consistent state in case of exceptions or errors encountered during execution of a task.

15. The system of claim 12 wherein a workspace provides an isolated environment for task execution so that task execution action does not affect an external environment until all tasks in the tasklist are completed successfully.

16. The system of claim 12 wherein the tasklist manager is adapted to create, merge and abort task workspaces automatically based on task operations.

17. The system of claim 12 wherein the tasklist manager is adapted to initialize and associate all task and tasklist attributes to task and tasklist instances, respectively.

18. The system of claim 12 wherein the collaborative environment comprises an Internet collaboration environment, wherein the modeling and execution of business process occurs by multiple people at different geographic locations communicating by collaborating with a web browser.

37. The system of claim 12 wherein the tasklist template further comprises a document type definition that is automatically invoked in response to a triggering event to automatically instantiate an instance of the tasklist.

19. A computer program product stored in a memory comprising:

a computer useable medium having computer readable code means embodied therein for causing a computer to execute a project within a collaborative environment in a database system, the computer readable code means in the computer program product comprising;

computer readable program code means for causing a computer to create a parent workspace in the database system for a parent project and at least one child workspace in the database system for each child project of the parent project, wherein each child workspace is isolated from the parent workspace and configured to operate on data content of the parent workspace concurrently with any other child workspace and independently of any other child workspace;

computer readable program code means for causing a computer to create at least one task type, each task type modelling a task in a business process, and at least one tasklist template comprising an ordered set of tasks connected to each other via task associations;

computer readable program code means for causing a computer to detect an occurrence of a tasklist trigger event of a child project and associate a task list template with the child project;

computer readable program code means for causing a computer to automatically invoke execution of the associated tasklist template for each task of each child project in a respective child project task workspace, each task being executed in an isolated environment independent of any other task;

computer readable program code means for causing a computer to merge data content from each child project task workspace back to the child project workspace at any point in time during execution of a respective task;

computer readable program code means for causing a computer to make the data content of each task merged to the child workspace visible to all other child workspaces at the time the data content is merged; and

computer readable program code means for causing a computer to merge a content of each child workspace back to the parent workspace.

20. An article of manufacture comprising:

a computer useable medium having computer readable code means embodied therein for causing a computer to execute a project within a collaborative environment in a database system, the computer readable code means in the computer program product comprising;

computer readable program code means for causing a computer to create a parent workspace in the database system for a parent project and at least one child workspace in the database system for each child project of the parent project, wherein each child workspace is isolated from the parent workspace and configured to operate on data content of the parent workspace concurrently with any other child workspace and independently of any other child workspace;

computer readable program code means for causing a computer to create at least one task type, each task type modelling a task in a business process, and at least one tasklist template comprising an ordered set of tasks connected to each other via task associations;

computer readable program code means for causing a computer to detect an occurrence of a tasklist trigger event of a child project and associate a task list template with the child project;

computer readable program code means for causing a computer to automatically invoke execution of the associated tasklist template for each task of each child project in a respective child project task workspace, each task being executed in an isolated environment independent of any other task;

computer readable program code means for causing a computer to merge data content from each child project task workspace back to the child project workspace at any point in time during execution of a respective task;

computer readable program code means for causing a computer to make the data content of each task merged to the child workspace visible to all other child workspaces at the time the data content is merged; and

computer readable program code means for causing a computer to merge a content of each child workspace back to the parent workspace.