It’s called Click and Flow and comes from the more than capable hands of Werner Götz and his team from Werner Götz IT Solutions GmbH.
Werner Götz had an idea a few years ago. What about a software, that makes creating workflows and running them, easier than ever? Fortunately his first customer was thrilled by his idea and went along on the journey to develop Click and Flow. That was five years ago. Today that product evolved in an rather impressive tool, based (almost) entirely on XPages.
Some of us still know Lotus Workflow. I liked it a lot and it is still out there, if somebody wants it. We had huge applications running at a customer site, but it had a few quirks and we still had to develop applications, that could be used with Workflow. Click and Flow comes with a lot if not all the bells and whistles ready to use. You can extend it with additional special fields and code, but it is amazing how far you can go with Click and Flow, just using the standard features. I am pretty confident, that you can do at least 94.42% of your daily business with it. And it is very, very useful for all those small but important tasks, everybody always forgets, because they are not used that often.
For example the „Buy coffee for the boss“ task. Start it, with all the information’s you need, because he wants his special coffee blend from that Malaysian online store … and finish with the prove that you did it, but the box was stolen by pirates in the red sea. With Click and flow it also does make sense to design small workflows, because it will pay pack quickly.
Got a Notes Client? Let’s start.
Open Simplex Click and Flow.
Create a new workflow.
Define Fields and how they should work (Click, click, click…)
Define to whom and where it should go.
Add Formulas if needed.
Add Users.
Done!
Run! (or Open Browser, Run!)
Neat eh? 10 minutes and you got a working workflow which eases live tremendously. It’s a business case. Productivity will rise (tell that the guy with the big company wallet, because it does, really).
For any company that needs a variety of workflows small and big, Click and Flow is a tool to consider. This is what IBM had in mind, when they created the XServer. Everybody will go „WOW (or „Boh ey“ in Germany), how nice, finally something that looks cooler than SAP“ and would never know, that it runs on Domino.
And since it is all Xpages, how about integrating it with Connections?
I don’t know another product that easy on the market for Sharepoint and normally these tools are much, much more expensive to buy and more complicated to install than the 15 minutes you need for this one (provided you got a trusty old Domino server standing around somewhere).
But how about Click & Flow AND Sharepoint … have to talk to Werner … should work. It’s XPages after all.