HR Workflow Applications Framework

Situation

Harbinger's Customer, a provider of 24x7 employee benefits portal for disseminating employee benefits information, wanted to introduce common employee-HR workflow applications integrated with this existing portal.

Challenge

Delivering customizable content and applications in a single context of employee benefits website was the key. Harbinger studied popular enterprise workflow applications. However we found them, on the one hand, to be an overkill for the job at hand, and on the other hand, inadequate for the employee benefits context.

The required workflow applications such as benefits enrollment etc. could not be specified completely up-front, but would get added to the system on an on-going basis. What was needed was a framework for adding such applications.

Harbinger Solution

Harbinger Systems proposed a framework based approach. Harbinger was involved in high-level design and development of this framework.

The framework can interpret workflow written in an XML file and can render the forms accordingly. The fields in every workflow step, their visibility and editability is also described in the XML document. The framework will resolve organization hierarchy dynamically to decide the next user in the workflow. The framework supported active forms, reports and query filters.
 

• NET 2.0
• EXT JS framework, JavaScript, JSON
• XML, XSLT, CSS
• MS SQL Server

Benefits

Developing an application was reduced to writing an XML document along with JavaScript and SQL queries. This increased the speed of application development. Also the testing time reduced for each application.