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Activating Email Notification for Expense Reports

The following procedure explains how to activate the Expense Report Process workflow that provides automatic email notification during the expense report approval process. These messages notify expense report approvers when they need to review particular expense reports and provide expense report submitters with updates on the progression of their expense reports through the approval process. This procedure assumes that your Siebel Communications Server has already been set up and configured, as described in Siebel Communications Server Administration Guide.

Before activating a workflow you first need to deploy the Expense Report workflow process. There are two steps involved in deploying a workflow process, because the workflow process definitions are stored as repository objects, while deployed workflow processes are stored in run-time tables along with their deployment parameters. You deploy workflow processes from the Siebel Tools repository to the Business Process Designer Administration client.

The first step to deploying a workflow process uses the Deploy button in the Object List Editor of Siebel Tools. The second step uses the Workflow Deployment view in the run-time client to change the status of the workflow process to Active and make it available for deployment.

For information on deploying and activating specific workflows, see Siebel Business Process Framework: Workflow Guide.

To activate email notification for expense reports

1. In the run-time client, Navigate to the Administration - Business Process screen > Workflow Deployment view and query for the workflow you just deployed.

   NOTE:  For information on deploying and activating specific workflows, see Siebel Business Process Framework: Workflow Guide.

2. With the Expense Report Process workflow selected, click the Activate button.

   This checks the syntax for validity, registers run-time events if used, and changes the status of the process to Active. It also changes the status of the previous active version to Outdated.

3. Set the deployment parameters for the workflow process:
   1. Set the activation date in the Activation Date/Time field.
   2. Set the expiration date in the Expiration Date/Time field.
   3. Set the replication to None, unless you are deploying the workflow process to mobile clients.
   4. Set the monitoring level in the Monitoring Level field.
4. Complete the following substeps to verify associated workflow policy settings:
   1. Navigate to the Administration - Business Process screen > Policies view.
   2. In the Policies List, enter a query to locate the following policies:
      • Send Expense Report Approval Email policy
      • Send Expense Report Approval Email to New Approver policy
   3. Make sure that the Activation and Expiration settings for these policies match the Activation Date/Time and Expiration Date/Time settings you specified in Step 3.
5. In the Workflow Processes list, reselect the Expense Report Process record that has a status of In Progress.

   For information on activating specific Siebel Workflows, see Siebel Business Process Framework: Workflow Guide.

6. Now you can invoke the workflow process from any of the invocation modes—the Process Simulator, a script, or Workflow Policies.

   For information on the different invocation modes, see Siebel Business Process Framework: Workflow Guide.