Portal, Platform Workflow Technology

With the development of enterprise information technology, EIP (Enterprise Information Portal) becomes one kind of popular enterprise information platform. Multitudinous software companies successively invest and issue their own Portal products. However, the present mainstream of Portal products aims at the major enterprises but not the small ones or the ones subordinate to the major enterprises. The latter usually can not afford those Portal products. Therefore, the Portal platform with moderate cost for the small and medium-sized enterprises is needed urgently so as to lower the threshold of entering the enterprise office automation market, to promote the information technology development in small and medium-sized enterprises and to improve their innovation ability and business management skills.Due to the fact that the work flows management system can improve and optimize the service flow, enhance the office work efficiency, realize the better service process control, improve the quality of customer service and enhance the flexibility of service flow, the research on work flows technology is at present a hot subject of Portal products in EIP software field. Multitudinous Web frame designers also realize the importance of using work flows in their work, and express their suggestion on work flow of source opening project. Therefore it is concluded here that the application of work flow technology into the EIP platform has good prospects for development.This paper firstly elaborates the development of enterprise information portal and workflow technology and analyzes the present mainstream of portal products and workflow products in China and the abroad. Then it proposes the MEOP (Minor Enterprise Oriented Portal) designed for the small and medium-sized enterprises with brief introduction of its content management, searching and integrated module designing.The focus of the research is the designing and realizing of work flow module IdFlow in the MEOP platform. IdFlow is designed mainly for the management ofsuch typical work flows in the small and medium-sized enterprises as documents examination and approval and information issuing. And detailed elaboration is made on the process definition language, the transformation of workflow definition, the conversion of data within workflow system, the system connections and how to be connected with MEOP. Finally an example of applying IdFlow in Tianjin Public Transportation Information System for the purpose of oil examination and approval function is introduced to confirm the feasibility of the system.