Workflow Engine use in education

[dhicks]

Hello All,

 

Does anyone use / have experience with using a Workflow Engine in education? I'm probably thinking more from the point of view of use by teachers and admin staff do at least partly automate tasks, but someone might be using one with pupils too (hmm, might be good for homework?). I'm looking to automate various tasks to do with image processing / indexing, and I'm wondering if I should build something from scratch or if there's an existing framework / standard that I should make use of.

[dhicks]

Does anyone use / have experience with using a Workflow Engine in education?

 

I'll assume "no" - I did a quick Google search after asking this question, and found this post at the top of the results...

[dhicks]

Does anyone use / have experience with using a Workflow Engine in education?

 

Ah ha:

 

https://agilevision.io/blog/serverless%20architecture/2017/02/12/easily-create-complex-workflows-with-aws-step-functions.html

 

Now I could just do with a nice, simple way to be able throw together a script at no notice and run it without having an AWS-enabled development environment to hand...

[CAWJames]

We use a software called Therefore marketed by Canon, which used to be called ADOS, a document management system(now being branded as a information management system). Basically all paper documents are digitized and stored in a structure we can search. This also gives us a very robust workflow system where we can chuck in a document(say a Learner Progress Review form, but any document really)it will then kick off and send it off to everyone who needs it with a prompt email, the user then does what he/she needs and sends it on. We also put any relevant email/correspondence from or to students into the system. This means, we can search by student and see everything from initial application to forms for car parking, to general correspondence. Very powerful, but also not cheap, but we have been using it for 10 years and forms the core of our system. In terms of the workflow to use an example, we have one for new staff starters. HR upload a document showing name, centre, job title, date of start etc. I get an email saying New Starter, please create. I then create the user in AD/Exchange, and tick the box in the software to show I have done it, it then moves on to admin who add them to our MIS, then it goes to 2 or 3 staff who tick a box to say they have trained the user in key systems, it then comes back to me, to confirm they have a badge. It keeps sending emails until we update the index to show we have completed our tasks. Once all done, it goes back to HR with a completed flag. Hands off and makes our lives easier

[synaesthesia]

Is Flow in Office 365 no good for this? Looks to tick a lot of boxes and we've certainly considered it. Haven't investigated it enough really so interested to see if anyone else has.

[vikpaw]

Is Flow in Office 365 no good for this? Looks to tick a lot of boxes and we've certainly considered it. Haven't investigated it enough really so interested to see if anyone else has.

 

Haven't looked at this much. Not really sure how it differs from Sharepoint workflows which was my first thought for this.

 

I guess this is all more document based, whereas dealing with images is going to be different.

 

Depending on what you want to do I know some people outside of education have had success with automation using IFTTT

 

I used to use it to get notifications when someone posted on our school Facebook page.

[pcstru]

Does anyone use / have experience with using a Workflow Engine in education?

We make use of sharepoint workflows for our ticket list but it is limited to just working out which emails needs to be sent to whom. I did use some powershell to populate sharepoint lists from our MIS when we were using sharepoint for lates etc, which might be a way to do some complex image processing to obtain an index/hash (or generate other metadata) prior to upload. My gripe with sharepoint is it is such a huge mess - as soon as you need to step beyond the basics it gets very deep very quickly, and it is all so ... finickity.

[jdoyle]

We make use of sharepoint workflows for our ticket list but it is limited to just working out which emails needs to be sent to whom. I did use some powershell to populate sharepoint lists from our MIS when we were using sharepoint for lates etc, which might be a way to do some complex image processing to obtain an index/hash (or generate other metadata) prior to upload. My gripe with sharepoint is it is such a huge mess - as soon as you need to step beyond the basics it gets very deep very quickly, and it is all so ... finickity.

 

I did some Sharepoint workflows for teacher absence requests and training requests. Have to agree with the "finickity" once you go beyond the basics.

[dhicks]

Very powerful, but also not cheap

 

Can it do tasks other than send emails, or is email its main communication mechanism?

[dhicks]

Is Flow in Office 365 no good for this?

 

I'll have to take a look at that, thanks. My thinking at the moment is a web-based development environment that can pull in documents and data from various sources (Google Drive, MIS, etc), procces them and produce a result, be that sending a notification email, writing a document, or whatever. So far, something like this as a development environment looks close:

 

https://www.pythonanywhere.com/

 

It just needs to have a bunch of school-orientated libraries installed (GAM for Google Admin Console automation, maybe an interface for getting data from SIMS or other MIS, etc), and be flexible enough to be able to read / write data to Google Drive and Office 365.

[CAWJames]

the emails are mainly notifications to tell someone to do something, but it can automate within the flow too, it can export or convert documents, call other workflows, and you can add your own custom DLL for custom actions.