Workflows, processes, tasks, and triggers form the building blocks of the automation tools One Church Software offers. This enables you to instruct the system to automatically perform tasks on your behalf. Basically, it will work for you and perform actions based on the rules you set.
Everything the workflow engine does centers around person profiles. As such, only people who have profiles in the system can be added to a workflow.
Let's quickly define all the major players:
Workflows
Workflows are basically containers for one or more processes. They help organize and group related processes together. For example, you may have a workflow named "Next Steps" responsible for getting people connected to your church which contains processes all related to various portions such as new believer steps, serving, attending small groups, etc.
See this article for help adding a new workflow.
Processes
Processes contain a set of actionable tasks which together comprise a piece of an overall workflow. Processes basically organize a set of tasks together.
You can either add a person manually to a process or define triggers which will add them automatically for you once the criteria for the trigger occurs. In this way, you can fully automate an entire process which will really save you time.
As an example, you could have a process called "First Time Guest" within a workflow named "Next Steps." This process would have tasks such as sending out emails or SMS, assigning for a pastor to follow up, adding them to a group, and more.
There are two ways to add a person to a process: manually or through the use of triggers.
See this article for help on adding a process to an existing workflow.
Triggers
Triggers are set at the process level. They allow you to define rules which, when true for a particular person, will automatically add them to the first task within the process.
See this article for help on defining triggers on a process.
Tasks
Tasks do the actual work within a process such as sending emails, assigning tasks, updating person profiles, coordinating progress, and much more.
A process contains one or more tasks which lists everything the process does. A task can be automated or require manual intervention to complete.
See this article for a list of the tasks that can be added to a process.
People
People are added to processes and go through each defined task sequentially until they complete the process. There are three ways a person can be added to a process:
Along the way, a person in the process can go through various statuses which indicate what is going on.
The basic statuses are:
Queued - the person does not currently have a task but is waiting for the workflow engine to put them in one. This can happen when a person is first added to the process, when the timer on their Wait task expires, or when their assignment is finished.
Waiting - the person is currently on a Wait task and the timer has not expired yet.
Done - there is no more work to be done with the person in the process. All tasks have been completed.
The following statuses are only used when the person is currently on an Assignment task.
Not Started - the person was assigned to someone but they have not begun yet.
In Progress - this status is chosen by the assignee to indicate they are currently working on the task.
Reassign - this status is used when the assignee has requested that someone else handles this Assignment task.
Incomplete - the assignment was previously marked as "In Progress" and has passed the due date.
Past Due - the assignment was previously marked "Not Started" and has passed the due date.