Let me work those flows for(m) you - Case Supervisiondoc at University of Jyväskylä
"In this presentation I will present and demonstrate our new Plone add-on for building form based business workflow applications with Plone. Our real world case Supervisiondoc, a service with which a postgraduate student and his/her supervisors can easily document and communicate the progress of the thesis process. Additionally I will discuss the requirements for a good workflow solution and generally walk you through this agile development project.
At University of Jyväskylä we have used Plone since 2004. We leverage it for various purposes: we have built public and intranet websites, video publishing platforms, learning management systems, customized applications, over 1000 digital forms and lots of integrations on top of it. You name it, we have it.
Lately at University of Jyväskylä there has been even more demand, both from management and user level, for rapid digital transformation. There still remains lots of paperwork, uneffective processes or old, unmaintainable digital solutions.
At 2018 our development team has had a task is to find a general, hopefully one-size-fits-all -solution for different workflow problems at our university. Another task is to actually solve some of the workflow digitalisation needs, which have been already identified and prioritized.
As mentioned, one of the cases is so called supervision document for postgraduates in their thesis process. For this case we found solace from Plone, leveraging it’s dexterity content types, XML schemata, flexible workflow, permission management, content rules, commenting and various other features, and adding just enough more functionality on the frontend for a tech-savvy non programmer/integrator to manipulate this through-the-web. Supervisiondoc has been running in production since 1st september 2018, serving hundreds of documents and new users.
Keywords: Plone, workflow, TTW, digitalization, forms, open source, agile"