Best Online Examples of Workflow Patterns?

g8orade writes "In his bestselling book, The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman lists workflow management software in the top 5 Flatteners. During my work for a shipping startup, I have analyzed our software's many UI weaknesses, particularly related to workflow management, and am currently searching for the best online examples of various UI application patterns / widgets that address managing transaction flows. What are the best examples you know of that are commonly viewable on the web?"

"Our software UI is Oracle (9i) Forms compiled to run with Java, through the web. We're using RT for our internal ticket tracking and it has many of the features listed. Also, we're evaluating several commercial document management systems as bolt-ons or companions to our in-house application. Here are some patterns we'd like to improve:

• Queue with count beside it. Example: 'Unshipped orders (5)'
• Screen for UI building of a search and ability to save the search as a queue
• List of queues showing all transaction counts and their various states
• Transaction list / table screen (should have an many possible features as a standard spreadsheet: pick your columns, column order, sort order, clickable column headings, export to various formats, print view, etc.)
• Detail view screen (one transaction, may include too many fields to display at once, requiring tabs, scrolling up and down, left to right, etc., should have a good printable view)
• Contact database built-in or connection to one from another system
• Auto messaging of various statuses to contacts and lists of contacts, above
• Full web accessibility and security model to allow our suppliers and clients access to their own queues for 'pull queries', in addition to what we email them.
• Ability to create a list of values for a field, then incorporate that into the query for a queue.
• Journal of a transaction
• Screen showing progression of a transaction
• Screen showing Parent / child parts of a transaction"

Examples

[Velox_SwiftFox]

Well, I've always thought a little icon of an envelope was pretty good for representing mail.

Best Practice

[Anonymous Coward]

I found an excellent resource [thedailywtf.com] for this. They cover a new example each work day. Some of the examples are truly brillant.

Re:Why patterns?

[MrNixon]

Perhaps we should coin a new law for the Internet and call it Nixon's Law:

Nixon's Law states that:

Any discussion of resonable length on the Internet will eventually devolve into a discussion about Google.

C'mon man. It's just a search engine. They've managed to index a whole lot of content and it *is* quite useful, but it's still a search engine - I'm not quite convinced that Google is the second coming, or even the cure for cancer.

It's amazing how the flavour of the moment is always the solution to all our problems - but if history serves, Google will be an important and perhaps integral part of our future society and economy - but it will not be the universal solution that we seem to think it will be.

Workflow depends on ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... (1) how many bottles of Scotch the Brass are willing to
give me outside the contract.

One bottle ... they'll get much less than 40 hrs in 5 days.

Two bottles ... I'll probably fell sorry for them and take
them out to dinner.

A bottle a day ... now we're talk'n about a 40+ hr per 5 day
week workflow ... but not much more.

5 bottles of Sake and dinner each day ... now we're talk'n about
a regular 72 hr workflow in 5 days.

The key to a Samurai's heart is through the stomach.

Cheers!