Perceptive Content (ImageNow) Workflow Basics and Best Practices

Lear some of the basic functions and some of RPI’s best practices for setting up Perceptive Content (ImageNow) Workflow to help automate complex business processes.

Today, we’ll be covering the Perceptive Content workflow basics and best practices. Workflow allows you to route a document or folder to business processes from start to finish with a customizable set of options. It’s a pretty robust tool, it’s very flexible. Something that almost every Perceptive client uses. Almost all of your workflow configurations live within the Perceptive Content workflow designer, which is what we’ll be walking through today.

Some of the settings I like to have set up when I work with the workflow designer is really the just the toggle on my grid. Then make sure everything is snapped to grid, which is the second option here. What that allows you to do is organize your workflow so that it’s a lot better laid out and then in case another admin needs to get into this workflow, things are laid out logically and it’s a lot cleaner.

Some of these next options here just allow you to choose how you want these routes to display while they’re placed onto the workflow designer itself. There’s some zoom options here, then there’s a couple more text box options that are presented here. You’ll notice within this example I have a combination of containers, comment boxes and text boxes in order to achieve this look here.

This big gray box here is what Perceptive calls a container. It’s really just a giant gray box, once you have that selected you have a lot more properties here to allow you to change the color of the background and of the border. The other two options that are left up here, this is the comment box and then these are your text boxes. The difference between the two is the comment box looks like this with the white background, and the border. Your text box is really just a free floating text field. The way you can choose the font and the font sizes. I like to you use my text boxes as headers, and then my comment boxes just to place those around the workflow to give the admin a good idea of what’s happening without digging in too far to those scripts.

Another thing I like to do with my workflow is color code the items. Within this particular workflow, the queues have been surrounded in blue are the end user queues. Those are manual queues where end users are going to be assigned to for them to work. The gray queues are automated queues, so those are documents or folders going to flow into those queues, but those are all automated. Some sort of script or back end processing is what’s pushing those along. While the end user queues or waiting for an end user action in order to move that forward.

Now, talking about queues, you’ll notice inside of these queues in the top left corner, that symbol is going to denote which type of queue is being used currently for that specific queue. Here the top three that I commonly use are work queues, super queues and system queues. Everything else is a pretty specific queue used for a specific task, for example, content queue allows you to submit a particular document to content server to get those OCR results. Integration server queue, so that allows you to submit those to Envoy for a specific web service call.

The main ones, again, are your work, your super, and your system queues. The work queue is a traditional workflow queue, you can assign users to this queue. You an assign some sort script action to the queue, you can assign forms, application plans. It’s probably the most widely used queue here. The system queue is basically a work queue, but there is no security tied to system queue. I try to not use those queues so often, even though all of these