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Workflow with Liferay Portal

Liferay Portal includes a workflow engine called Kaleo. In Greek, this word means "called ones," which is appropriate for a w...

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Workflow with Liferay Portal


Liferay Portal includes a workflow engine called Kaleo. In Greek, this word means "called ones," which is appropriate for a workflow engine that will be calling users to participate in a process that has been designed for them.
Kaleo workflow allows a user to define any number of simple to complex business processes/workflows, deploy them, and manage them through a portal interface. Those processes have knowledge of users, groups, and roles without writing a single line of code—it only requires the creation of a single XML document.

Installation

Liferay's Kaleo workflow engine ships with CE versions of Liferay. If you have EE or if you have uninstalled it, the plugin can be installed through the built-in plugin repository. The name is kaleo-web, and you'll find it in the list of web plugins. Installing the plugin will add a number of new options to the Control Panel.
  • My Workflow Tasks
  • Workflow Configuration
  • My Submissions
  • Workflow
There is one default workflow that is bundled with the kaleo-web plugin: Single Approver Workflow. This workflow requires one approval before an asset can be published. One of the conveniences of using Liferay's workflow engine is that any roles that are specified in the workflow definition are created automatically when the definition is deployed. This provides a level of integration with the portal that third party engines cannot match. The Single Approver Workflow contains three roles each with different scopes. The scope of each role can be easily deduced by their names - Community Content Reviewer, Organization Content Reviewer, and Portal Content Reviewer.