Introduction
LiveCycle has two ways of sharing information about tasks with us humans.
- Email notifications - LiveCycle can send an email to anyone, when it is their turn to touch a business process. The email contains a link which opens the form.
- Visiting workspace - LiveCycle comes with a Web interface for helping to view/manage and perform tasks. It is called Workspace, and can be accessed using a browser. Workers find out about new tasks, usually by visiting the Workspace website.
The Too Many Emails problem
Everyone feels like they get bombarded by too many emails. Too many emails can be a major energy sapping problem in any enterprise. But what if you are receiving, in addition to your usual blast of email guff 30 emails every day concerning LiveCycle tasks? Talk about distraction - but this is constantly happening to case handlers!
The Too Many wasted Visits Problem
Some people only receive one or two tasks per week. If he or she is notified through email the task can get lost under a pile of other emails.
The only way of preventing this is to visit workspace every now and then, and do what ever is there in your todo list. If you are responsible to minimize customer wait-times then you'll be under pressure to make sure that your todo list is always empty, so even though there's nothing todo, most of the time, you'll need to visit, and revisit Workspace - just in case. What a hassle!
A Better Way
Wouldn't it be good if we could have a little bot do all that labor intensive work - visiting Workspace, logging in, and checking our todo list - without us having to raise a finger?
Wouldn't it be good if we could have have an alert sent to our desktop when a new task arrives?
Wouldn't our life be simpler if the bot sat in your system box and could give a graphic hint that work is waiting for our attention?
If yes read on ...
About LiveCycle
LiveCycle has the ability to match the task to the right person. Workflow tasks are performed by people in an enterprise and are typically data intensive; so they rely on leveraging Adobe's best-of-breed data capture technologies.
However if that person is not constantly checking his or her todo list these tasks can build up, or stagnate.
Enter Avoka Alerter!
Alerter for Workspace provides notification of new tasks in your LiveCycle ES Workspace queues by sending task alerts to your desktop. You can now be notified of LiveCycle ES Workspace tasks without having an open browser to host Workspace, or your email application to monitor notifications. Alerter also allows you to open, view and prioritize tasks, directly from the desktop!
- User and group tasks can be viewed from the desktop.
- There is an all queues view showing all user and group queues - as a barchart.
- You can quickly access a detailed view of any queue.
- Clicking on any task will open its respective form.
- Views are automatically refreshed.
- The application can just sit in the system tray.
- A new task arriving to one of your queues creates a popup alert you your desktop.
- The application is highly configurable.
- Updates can be automatically detected and installed.
New tasks are alerted to your desktop as yellow toast popups. The opened application shows your personal work queue and each of your group queues as bars in a barchart. The longer the bar, the more tasks allocated to that queue.
Installation
To run this application you'll need to install the Adobe Integrated Runtime - also known as AIR. Click here to install AIR. AIR, offers an exciting new way to create user applications applications with a strong user interface without requiring changes to existing technology, people, or processes.
System Requirements
- Tested on Win XP/Vista (should run on Mac).
- Air version: 1.1.0 or Above.
- LiveCycle ES 8.0 or above (installed on a server).
Download Avoka Alerter
Startup
For Windows XP: Start >> All Programs >> Avoka >> Avoka Alerter for Workspace.
First Run
Enter in the name and port number of your LiveCycle ES server. And enter in your username and password. In my case I have a LiveCycle Server running on my local computer; so I entered "localhost" (this computer) and ":8080" which is the default port number that the turn-key version of LiveCycle listens on. If you don't know what the server name is ask your LiveCycle administrator.
In future the application should remember your server settings. Your username, and password are encrypted, and then stored onto your computer.
View All Work Queues
Anytime new outstanding work is allocated to you a set of popup messages will appear from the bottom right corner of your screen (see below). Clicking on any of these messages will open that form in workspace.
The main view of tasks allocated to you is shown in summary format as a bar-chart:
- Work directly allocated to you is shown as a bar with your name attached to it. In this case user Alex Pink has 4 items of work directly allocated.
- Tasks that have a pending deadline are displayed in red.
- Work allocated to a group that you are member of is shown - along with the name of the group shown.
Group AvokaTestGroup has 1 item of work allocated to it. Alex is a member of that group; so is shown that item on the application. This is likewise for the group Circus Performers.
View a Specific Queue
You can drill-down to detailed views of your outstanding work by clicking on one of any the bars when viewing all queues, or if you are not a member of any group queues you be taken straight to a table view of your view.
System Tray
The application runs in the system tray. Click on - to hide the app to the task-bar, and on x (top right) to dock the app to the system tray.
If you have outstanding work to be done the icon appears to change to a red center.
Configuration
Click on Configure to view the application configuration settings.
- Queue refresh rate is the number of seconds wait-time before refreshing the local task information. NOTE:Be aware that setting this refresh rate too short will place additional load on the server. The more people using the application the higher the refresh rate should be so as to reduce server loading, as opposed to setting it short and getting your alert quickly.
- Toast lifetime is the length of time the toast message appear on the screen before they fade into the background.
- Select Automatically log in to have the application automatically log into workspace when it starts up.
- Select Automatically startup to have the application start when the computer is started.
Conclusion
Alerter for Workspace is an easy and convenient way for users to view and manager their outstanding items of work. It is an easy to install, easy to use, desktop application that speeds up task access and task management for people with busy work queues.
Avoka Alerter for Workspace (Free!)
Posted by Anonymous at 
Great little tool! Here's a feature request, however. I'd like to be able to configure the URL used for clicking through to a task. It goes to http://server:port/workspace. On our systems, we've customized LC so that workspace is on the root (i.e. not at /workspace). It's be great if one could configure that in a future version.