WebSphere Lombardi Edition 7.2 > Use Process Portal > Run tasks


Collaborate on tasks

Process participants can collaborate on tasks to ensure that they are completed on time and that the goals of the process instance are met. Read the following sections to learn how to request help from other process participants, view help requests received from other process participants, add comments to a process instance, and generate and view task-related alerts.


Create a help request

Process participants can collaborate on a process instance and its related tasks by submitting help requests to each other. For example, if you do not understand a specific task or cannot complete the task, you can request help from other process participants. If you receive a help request from another process participant, you can either answer or ignore the help request.

To create a help request, you must have permission

  1. From My Tasks > Inbox , click on the name of the process instance on which you want to request help.

  2. From the process instance details page, click the Request Help icon on the toolbar .


  3. In the Add Help Request dialog box, type the Lombardi user name of the individual who will receive the help request in the To field. Add a comment to the help request and then click Save.

    To send a help request to a group, enter ROLE:<group name> in the To field, where <group name> is the name of the Lombardi security group such as tw_authors. The help request will be sent to all members of the specified group.

  4. The help request is posted in the Collaboration section of the process instance details page


View help requests

If you receive a help request from another process participant, you can either answer or ignore the help request.

To respond to a help request, you must have permission

  1. From My Tasks > Help Requests , click on the name of the process instance or task that contains the help request that you want to view.

  2. The Collaboration section in the process instance details page lists help requests that you have sent and received, including the date, the sender, the recipient, and the help message. Click on the help request to view its details.

  3. In the View Help Request dialog box, click Reply to answer the help request or click Ignore to ignore the help request. If you are replying, add your message to the Reply to Help Request dialog box, and then click Save.

  4. Your response to the help request is posted in the Collaboration section of the process instance details page where the sender of the help request can view your response.


Add a comment to a process instance

Process participants can collaborate on a process instance and its related tasks by adding comments to the process instance. For example, you can use comments to communicate status updates to other process participants. Unlike help requests, comments generally are informative and do not require a response.

To add a comment to a process instance, you must have permission

  1. From My Tasks > Inbox , click on the name of the process instance on which you want to comment.

  2. From the process instance details page, click the Add Comment button in the Collaboration section as shown in the following image.


  3. In the Add Comment dialog box, Everyone is specified in the To field by default. Add a comment and then click Save.

    You cannot specify a Lombardi user or group in the To field.

  4. The comment is posted in the Collaboration section of the process instance details page. All other process participants can view the comment.


Generating alerts

Process participants can collaborate on a process instance and its related tasks by generating task-related alerts. Alerts are directives that are automatically sent to a specific user or group when a process participant runs a task for an activity in a business process definition (BPD) whose underlying service contains a Send Alert component. Alerts are similar to comments in that alerts are informative and do not require a response.

The recipients, the priority, the subject, and the message of an alert are determined by the Send Alert component in the underlying service. When the alert is generated, the recipients of the alert can view the alert in Lombardi Process Portal.

For more information about configuring a Send Alert component for a service, see Understand service components in Lombardi Authoring Environment User Guide.


View alerts

To view a task-related alert:

  1. Select My Tasks > Alerts .

  2. Click on the name of the instance that contains the alert that you want to view.

    The Task Narrative section of the process instance details page displays the alert message. The Collaboration section of the process instance details page displays the alert date, the sender, the recipient, and also the alert message. The process participant who started the task that generated the alert is the sender of the alert.

  3. Click on the alert in the Collaboration section of the process instance details page to view the alert details in the View Alert dialog box.

Parent topic: Run tasks

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