Design And Implementation Of A Distributed Workflow System Based On Web Service And .NET Platform

With the development of the computer and network technology, the process of enterprise's informationization is strengthened progressively. From the simple data management system to complicated enterprise application such as ERP, MIS and OA, the scope of informationalized has been expanded frorn the unit, LAN to the whole Internet. At present, centralized management, distributed application, high efficiency cooperate, low cost dispose etc have been becoming the most obvious and important characteristic of information platform. And among them, as the key technology to realize the enterprise's business operation modeling and integrated management, the workflow can not only implement the transformation of business and operational procedure, but also become the bridge of integrating multiple businesses, as well the flexible platform can reduce the cost of system building even more. Especially in the large-scale group enterprises, the IT department is facing to various intractable problems like complicated organization, flexible business flow and complicated personal relationship and so on. And as result, the direction of workflow platform will be distributed, loose coupling, cross platform, cross organize, and high interoperability. So a service oriented technology named web service is becoming the basal technology of the distributed system progressively with its opening, interoperability and platform independence.This paper takes an actual situation of one large-scale corporation as the background, firstly analysis the business requirement of workflow platform. And then it compares the advantages and deficiencies of popular workflow products and technology stand by the point of changing and integration. Finally it comes up with a solution of distributed workflow platform based on the Web Service technology. In second section, this article designs the data model and controlled model of this platform, then introduce development framework of .NET and how to use XML as modeling language. In order to represent how to apply the platform to the actual project, it takes a real project as example to explain the key problem in the solution during the process of developing. This platform has already succeeded in implementing and offering service for a lot of projects, practice has proved that it can reduce the system build time greatly, and provide the data source service for enterprise portal.