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About the WF/Task Editor Toolbar

The WF/Task Editor Toolbar is used to manage deployment of a workflow process. Upon first use, you must expose the WF/Task Editor Toolbar. From the application-level menu, choose View > Toolbars > WF/Task Editor Toolbar. To identify a button in the WF/Task Editor Toolbar, position your mouse over an icon in the toolbar, then note the button's name appears in a small pop-up message.

Table 12 describes buttons on the WF/Task Editor Toolbar.

For procedural information on publishing and activating a workflow process, see Process of Deploying a Workflow Process.

Manual Deployment of a Workflow Process

You can publish a workflow manually from within Siebel Tools or from within the Siebel client. To publish a workflow manually in Siebel Tools, you use the Publish button or the Publish/Activate button found in the WF/Task Editor toolbar.

The Publish/Activate button allows you to both deploy and activate a workflow process with one click. If you use the Publish/Activate button rather than the Publish button to publish the workflow process while in local mode, it is not necessary to separately activate the workflow in the Siebel client.

About the Activate Button in the Siebel Client

If you choose to publish a workflow but not activate it, you can use the Siebel client to activate the workflow by clicking the Activate button in the Workflow Deployment view.

The Activate button chooses the active version of the workflow process in the run-time tables. Only one version of a workflow process can be active at a time for a Siebel Enterprise.

Activate provides version control to address an environment where multiple developers can publish multiple versions of the same workflow process. Activation occurs from within the Siebel client, where multi-select is supported.

Validation of a Workflow Process

When you click the Publish button or the Publish/Activate button, the workflow process is validated before it is published. If there are validation errors for the workflow, a dialog box appears, giving you the opportunity to correct errors before publishing.

This dialog box is modeless, meaning that you can keep it open to see the error messages while working on the workflow using the Process Designer to correct the problems reported. However, you can proceed with deployment despite validation errors if you choose to do so.

Deployment Changes Beginning with Siebel Version 8.0

A workflow process is deployed by using buttons in Siebel Tools called Publish and Publish/Activate. In earlier releases, the button was called Deploy, and activation can only take place in the Siebel client. Starting with Siebel version 8.0, you can activate a workflow in Siebel Tools, given you have set the VerCheckTime parameter in the Workflow section of the .cfg file to -1 ([Workflow] VerCheckTime = -1).

If there are no validation errors, you do not see this dialog box, nor do you see a message stating that the validation was successful. The validation is carried out without user visibility, unless errors are detected.

Comparing Copying to Revising a Workflow Process

In some cases, you can chose to copy an existing workflow process rather than revising it. The copy feature allows you to continue to work on the original workflow process should you need to use at some future point. To view an example, see Copying then Modifying an Existing Workflow Process.