Triggering Workflows via Events

ShareDo supplements its workflow engine with a technology called ‘complex event processing’. This is robust technology that has been proven to scale and perform highly. Indeed, in our own testing, we have processed up to 70,000 events per second, concluding that the technology is more than suitable for any use case we would encounter.

In very simple terms, the event engine works like this:

• ‘events’ are streamed in real-time to the event database. An event in ShareDo is either:
  • A change in state of a matter, i.e. a matter moves from the opening phase to the allocation phase, or
  • A change in state of a task, i.e. a work-item has been completed, placed on hold, deleted, etc., or
  • A data item has been added, deleted or changed.
  • Or indeed, any one of the over 100 business events defined within the platform.
• You can create unlimited workflows. A Workflow defines one or more actions that will trigger when pre-specified events are registered within the event database. Typical actions include the production of alerts, new tasks, generation of documents, emails, SMS messages, etc.
• (This is only a very high-level description - there is much more sophistication within the event engine - for example, looking for multiple events over historic periods of time before triggering actions; looking for things that haven’t happened rather than those that have).
• The event engine technology is used within ShareDo because it offers significant benefits:
  • It scales and is highly performant;
  • It supports non-linear workflows. For example, you could create a Workflow that calls for the production of a specific document when a predefined task is completed, without knowing when that task will occur or what might precede it.
  • It also supports linear work with SmartPlans that say ‘create task A upon creation of the matter’; ‘create task B upon completion of task A’; ‘create task C…..’
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