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TS 6.0 - Wizards and Workflows

whysguy

Greetings,

I am trying to get my head around the difference between Wizards and Workflows in TeamSite 6.0. I looked at the documentation (TS Admin, WF Developer, and UI Customization Guide) and I am not finding allot of info about wizards - am I missing something?

In case it's not in the documentation, here are a few of my questions:
1) when would one develop a solution as a wizard vrs. a workflow (or both for that matter)
2) What are the pros and cons of using one over the other
2) how configurable are wizards
3) what are the potential trigger-points for wizards

Thanks in advance.

- Billy

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Comments

Migrateduser

Billy,

Here is a non-definitive response:

A wizard controls the sequencing among multiple screens (or pages) for an activity within a single user session. It is always initiated by some user action, like clicking on a link, a menu item, or a button.

A workflow controls the sequencing among multiple operations (tasks) that may be performed by multiple agents (users and programs). It is usually started when a user selects Submit, saves changes to a DCR, or explicitly starts a New Job, but a workflow can also be started programmatically in response to some condition (trigger) or scheduled event.

Brinko Kobrin
Interwoven Staff Engineer

whysguy

Thanks for the clarification Brinko. I have done quite a bit with workflows so I am trying to figure out what the value-add is for wizards. As I understand it, the wizard framework isn't something that is exposed for external development (as opposed to the workflow sub-system), it is a mechanism that Interwoven is using to improve the user experience for certain activities within TeamSite. Is that correct? Either way it seems to overlap some of the functionality of workflow - but it lacks the flexibility of customization. What does Interwoven see as the future direction for this functionality, and is there a white-paper or something that describes wizards in more detail?

Gregg Faus

I would agree that wizards are nice for those non technical users and they do serve their purpose, but not having the ability to turn them off is also very frustrating. In a requested feature post of mine I suggest a few features that would be handy.

Coming from the 5.5 world I know my users will have a hard time adjusting to the new wizard interface. This is because before they just had to save and close and their content and it would appear on the website. Now they've got all these other options that will confuse them. I'd like to simplify things by just having them "Finish" a DCR and then close the form. This would then kick off the workflow that automatically generates all the pages, submits, and deploys the files. Now I've done a great deal of work to implement this workflow and understand that the wizard tries to handle this, but a good workflow can always "hide" what the user doesn't need to know. They just want to create or edit a form and submit it. And let whatever magic happen to make their content appear.

Just my opinion....

Migrateduser

Wizards are a common design paradigm used to guide casual users through operations. See for example http://www.uie.com/wiz_art.htm.

The ContentCenter Standard UI was designed for the casual TeamSite user; one who has limited knowledge of TeamSite operations. We found that those users favor the wizard-style of interaction, and that they desired the explicit confirmation that comes at the completion of each operation. Experienced TeamSite users will often find this type of hand-holding to be excessively tedious and verbose, so the ContentCenter Professional may be a better choice for those users. This is exactly why ContentCenter presents two different UIs.

The only public documentation regarding the ContentCenter wizards of which I am aware is the User Interface Customization Guide. At present the customization is primarily limited to the help portion of the wizards. However, I expect that the developers will be given greater access to the tools used to create these UIs in future releases.

Brinko Kobrin
Interwoven Staff Engineer