Tasks should be provided deadlines

It would be useful for task deadlines to 'trigger' from a configurable point. For example, x time after the beginning of the process or x time before the target end-time for a process.

Using the Absence Request as a scenario, it would be useful to be able to define a task deadline which would send a reminder (link to Notification topic) to the target actor if the task hadn't been acted upon within five days. Similarly, it would be useful to define a task deadline to send a reminder or perhaps escalate (link to Escallation topic) if the request had not been adjudicated at least two days prior to the request date.

Yes, the "deadline" can be either a duration (x amount of time after the task is started, which may dynamically be computed based on other important milestone like when the process was started) or an instant (at a precise time, which may as well be dynamically be computed based on other important milestones such as when the process is expected to complete).

If the deadline is met, then an event is fired. This event could be captured by an escalation process or by the process that created the task or any other process.

The ability to fire a reminder event is an additional requirement that is worth considering. This could be added in the future, or it could be a customization users could do (remember that all this is implemented as business processes that are shipped with the product and you can change as any other process), or it could also be explicitly handled in the processes that create the task. So is it worth starting with supporting task deadline without the reminder event (which would be easier, faster, cheaper to deliver) and discuss the reminder event later?, or do you and other interested users want it all at once?

It would probably gives more flexibility to discuss the "reminder event" as a seperate feature, imho, unless the vast majority of interested users believe otherwise. What do you think?

I think it's fine to discuss the reminder as a separate issue. Actually, assuming a timing event is triggered, the reminder functionality would likely be something that could be done using an external service such as an email or SMS gateway (which could either be a connector, or invoked via a web service).

Regarding the task deadline, I wanted to reiterate that it would be good to be able to calculate both from the start time, as well as backwards from a target time. Again with the Absence Request as an example, you'd typically be requesting for some point in time in the future. As that time approaches, it would be good to be trigger an event.

I was wondering about how this might be modeled; perhaps as an intermediate exception event? I would be interested in how others would consider modeling this functionality.

This is quite simple, when creating the task, the message schema will provide deadlines attribute to which you will be able to map duration/time values with the mapper. You may, for instance, you could map something like substract-dayTimeDuration($targetCompletionDateTime, 5), fully graphically - in the mapper - to the "time to complete deadline".

Hello,

Support for Task Deadline has been completed and is now part of Intalio|BPMS 5.2. The functionality is in both the Community Edition as well as the Enterprise Edition.

Detailed documentation and sample project can be found on the Intalio Support Wiki.

Thanks,

Shao.