New types of initiating actions - based on polling external events?

[#1]

Currently there are a set of operations/supporting functions that typically you want to have happen on a scheduled basis. To handle this you will typically either create a simple BPM process that does the polling and trigger another new process as needed, or create a custom service for example to monitor what you are looking at and when something new is found trigger the new process. Depending how you kick it off, this could use either a flagged action or a user action from ECL.

Examples include (but are not limited to)

1. Each day or week send an email digest of outstanding folders for a user from their ToDo list (exceeded deadline?)
2. When the combined amount of all requests for a particular process type exceeed $x trigger a new process to notify others and/or create a new purchase order
3. New files being dropped in a folder on the server to start some process
4. Emails arriving in an email box
5. Messages dropped on a message queue (MSMQ, Azure Message Queues, WebSphere MQ, others) to trigger the process

At a minimum this may be enabling a timed action to initiate a process and we include in the conditional nature of the action the "test condition" and do the work of reading the input from the appropriate location.

Having initiating action types specifically for email received, message received on queue, file appears and having the component in the Engine to actually monitor these things (email listener etc with ability to register additional listener type extensions) would be really nice. With this approach the action could indicate the parameters of the item it is watching for (from a particular email address, with attachment, xxx in subject, file extension is .xyz for file monitor etc). These could perhaps be triggered from any stage in the process, not just initiating.

What are your thoughts? I know numerous people have created Email Listener programs, but what do you think?

[#2]

That would certainly make life much easier, if it were architected in a thoughtful way.