Activities are usually represented as forms or wizards within the application (although some activities relate to processes that occur outside of the system, such as a
court appearance). Depending upon the circumstances in which they were started (or continued), activities may offer different fields (requiring more, less or different information) or exhibit different behaviour.
Typically, the different states/modes of an activity are incremental, resulting in a progressively more complete record each time the contents of the form is saved. For example, the
trust payment activity can be used to request, authorise and then, finally, process the resulting transaction. When these modes of operation are arranged sequentially (optionally omitting one or more intermediate steps), a
workflow is created. Thus, when steps are completed at different points in time and/or by different
members in the practice, the system can be used to model real-world business processes.
Due to the incremental nature of the steps in an activity, combined with the fact that one step always results in the creation of a completed record, the system is highly scalable; large firms with complex business processes may define multi-step workflows while smaller firms are more likely to use a small subset of the available steps.
Properties of an activity
- Each activity should have a concise, unique name. (You cannot assume that activities will always be displayed with respect to the group they are categorised in.)
- Most activities will be instances of internal activity types, which dictate their appearance, structure and behaviour. Other activities are defined in plug-ins.
- If an activity comes to the end of its usable lifespan, it can be marked as disabled.
- Each subsidiary company can either define its own set of activities or share a subset with The Practice. Additionally, certain activities can be made available to all companies.
- Activities can govern the way that tasks are created; the re-delegation and automatic removal options can be configured per-activity.
- For accounting activities (payments and receipts), you can limit the scope of an activity to a subset of the available payment methods.
- In an effort to reduce the frequency with which journals are started, an activity can declare which other activities are 'enslaved' to it (i.e. journals for those activities will be suppressed and their name and start time will be recorded in the active journal).
Starting activities
An activity can be started in three main ways:
- By clicking on the entry for the activity on the activities ribbon. (Not all activities appear on the ribbon, since they may require additional contextual information in order to commence.)
- Clicking on an action button within the program that is linked to an internal activity type. If the activity has been defined, it will be started. If multiple definitions exist for the same internal activity type, a pop-up selector will be presented. If the activity has not been defined (or is not available to the active service company), an error will be displayed.
- Creating a task to carry-out the activity. The activity is then started by double-clicking on the task.
Directives
Activities in ContactsLaw are able to send and receive selected information that can be used to communicate with other activities. For this purpose, a directive is an instruction and a small piece of information describing how to carry out that instruction. For example, when the Telephone call activity finishes, it can supply information about the contact involved to some other activity, such as the Document creation activity.
Each activity type exposes a list of directives that can be passed to and from the activity. When chaining activities together using document workflows and process models, you can choose which of these directives to pass from one to the other.
In addition to passing directives between themselves, activities can also draw upon files and documents as sources of information.
Non-interactive activities
Activities have the capacity to be non-interactive; i.e. they can run to completion without requiring any user input. Such activities can performed by the ContactsLaw Daemon. Note that interactive activities cannot be run non-interactively.
See also