There are two things which are irritating about viewing Folders at stages.

1. The window keeps jumping back to centre screen every time you click on a new tab.

This is just not required. I know of no other user interface that does this. Surely if I move the window somewhere else, so that I can view two folders at once, or another application, I would not want the window to jump back to centre screen every time I selected another tab?

I believe this may just be a bit of lazy programming that does this in form load, when it should do it only on the window load.

2. The window keeps resizing to the current form.

This is less irritating, but far more commonly noticed. The window jiggles about as it re-sizes. Factor in some speed issues when it renders complex form slowly, and the result is not good looking. We have to keep all forms in a process exactly the same size merely in order to minimise this issue, yet even so the window still jiggles about!

My take on this is, if the window is large enough to fit the current form, leave it alone. If it is not, then by all means re-size it to fit. That would be a fairly simple piece of code to manage, I would have thought. Probably four lines of code in all.

The scripting ribbon does not have any find/replace options. This makes is occasionally necessary to copy the text into some other text editor. Kindly add the ability to do find/replace functions within the Metastorm Designer.

A visual indicator to help users understand which available actions are critical path would be nice. Sometimes users need a reminder as to which actions will advance the process and which do not.

Similarly, would be nice to format actions available only to super-users differently.

This would be best if you did this by adding optional formatting properties to each action.

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?

[AUG-18-11  7:31 AM  Customer] 
Following the value chain approach to process decomposition means that we often need create end-to-end processes against business services which string together a numebr of businessProcesses. 

We need the capability to be able to create a workflow diagram against a businessService, which consists not of activities, but of various businessProcesses. 

This Enhancement Request has been submit on behalf of Serle Shuman from Old Mutual.

Currently you are completely unable to set the default order for Table Business Objects. This means that all editable grids can turn up in a random order. It would be nice to able to set teh default order.

We have many requestes to set the order, and we have to tell the customer that this is impossible. This does not reflect well on the product.

HTML is automatically rendered in grids*. It would be nice to be able to specify whether or not HTML is interpreted or rendered as plain text in grids. I believe it would be OK (and probably much easier) to manage this per grid rather than per column.

(*although there appears to be some in some versions that do not, although ours seem to work)

Please add the "add to dictionary" ability for the spell check field.

I have tried turning this on (changing AllowAddCustom="true" this is enabled (in default.skin), it then appears in the browser as an option however it does nothing, ie doesn't add to a dictionary.

<telerik:RadEditor Skin="Office2007" SpellCheckSettings-AllowAddCustom="false"  runat="Server" EnableEmbeddedSkins="True" EnableEmbeddedBaseStylesheet="True" />

This feature is available via the vendor supplying the rich text control (and spell check)... see http://www.telerik.com/help/aspnet/editor/customizingradspell.html

Currently the only way to add words (that I have found) is to modify the language files directly.

At present, when a flag is raised, the current Folder is set as the Flag Raiser (leaving the default as the current Folder). If we could set the Flag Raise, we could do a lot more.

As an example, when I want to raise a flag to move a dozen or so Folders from a Stage where there are a few thousand, I need to raise the flag as the FolderId of the folder(s) I want to move, and set the Flag action to respond to 'this folder'. Almost any other way is very sub-optimal, and can actually cause a huge performance impact (we've seen many instances where this mistake has been made).

Adding this feature would, for example, allow me to have a for-each activity, pass in a Business Object with the list of Folder Ids, and raise the flag for each one using the 'correct' Activity ratrher than the somewhat less useful 'generic' RaiseFlag activity as we must do now.

It appears that if you currently alter the definition of a business object anything currently mapped to that business object needs some attention. The simplest scenario of adding a new column to a query BO can result in the existing column mappings being lost. For the part of the BO interface that doesn't change surely this could be maintained.

Not sure if this has been raised before but it would be useful to be able to turn off the Stereotype display in models - something like the "view indicators" function.  We find some of our models are very busy and having stereotypes just makes it worse. It would be very useful to use the stereotype values on objects... but only display it where it was needed.  It would make the models more business friendly.

Given that the only way to create collapsible field groups is by docking panels to the same edge of their container (see our review with examples >here<), we desperately need a simple way to reorder these panels. At present the only way is to use the 'send to back' and 'send to front' commands. This is awkward, time consuming (for large forms) and prone to error.

The most obvious way, I would think, is to use the Tab Order. This is very easily changed on a field by field basis. If applied properly, it would also ensure the overall field tab order would flow properly from panel to panel.

Allow full RACI relationships within models and within Association grids. 
Currently consider the
R - Responsible for is the perfomer of the activity within its swimlane
A - Accountable for - is the Owner of a workflow - as indicated by the relationship between the Activity that is the subject of the model and the Owner of that model (at a higher level)
C - Contributes to - currently we have a customized associations for this but would be good to have a common way to do this (a built in association)
I - Informed about - currently we have a customized associations for this but would be good to have a common way to do this (a built in association)
Should be able to edit these either within a model or to view the RACI in an Association matrix - and edit in both places and if it is edited in one place it should appear in the other.
As a side note the CRUD relationships should be like that too - when you create the C, R, U or D it should create the appropriate association relationship, not just give you a visual representation in a model. Should be able to create the CRU or D relationships either in a matrix or when you are in a model and them to change the database so it can be seen and edited in both locations.

[AUG-16-11  8:52 AM  Customer] 
I need to be able to create a custom model in the modelling language to allow me to control exactly what links and object I want on the model. At the moment I am re-using the Navigator model for several purposes, which means I need to open the modelling language up to cater for all posibilities. i.e. I loose control of what the user is able to do.

This Enhancement Request has been submit on behalf of Serle Shuman from Old Mutual.

[AUG-16-11  8:45 AM  Customer] 
I need to be able to create a hierarchy of business classes.

This is submitted on behalf of Serle Shuman from Old Mutual.

I was a member of the Provision Product Advisory Board in 2009 and for part of 2010.  This panel had a number of excellent ideas for development of ProVision however I've not seen many of the PAB ideas turn up in ProVision releases although a good example of one that was delivered was the ability to download a modeling language from KE.

Could the PAB ideas please be added to this ideas section so we can support the ones we like.  Some of the ideas raised by the user community may in fact be very similar to ideas under discussion by the PAB.