System Conditions May Trigger Notification and Workflow
Outbound Messages. The mechanism for triggering communication to an external system described here does not take advantage of the configurable business object functionality that enables outbound messages to be triggered from a server-based script. Refer to Outbound Messages for more information about communicating with an external system using outbound messages.
There may be many noteworthy occurrences in the system, which should trigger the notification and workflow process.
Some of these occurrences may need to be communicated to an external system. Examples of when this may occur are as follows:
- You use an external software package, which uses information from the system and you need to send a message to this software package when certain attributes of the customer change.
- You need to inform third parties when something changes about a customer. For example, if you are a distribution company, you probably advise a customer's energy supply company when their meter is changed or when the customer stops. Or if a customer, who has been referred to a collection agency, makes a payment, you will need to inform the agency of the payment.
In many scenarios, you may want more than just a notification to be sent out, but you would also require a workflow process. For example, perhaps when a customer's mailing address changes, you want to a) send a confirmation letter to the customer's old address and their new address; b) inform a third party service provider about the change; and c) send the update to an external marketing system. In this case, the act of changing the mailing address could trigger a workflow process, which would perform the above steps.
You may have other scenarios where a noteworthy condition in the system should trigger a workflow process, which does not require a notification to be sent out of the system. For example, perhaps your company follows a sophisticated procedure for starting service, which requires certain events to transpire before other events can occur. You could create a workflow process, which gets triggered upon starting service to handle this sophistication.
In summary, when something occurs in the system, you may need to
- Create a notification download staging (NDS) record. You would do this if you only need to send a message to an external system.
- Create a notification upload staging (NUS) record. You would do this if you need to trigger a workflow process to do one or more steps. One of the workflow events in this process could create a NDS if an external system needs to be informed.