Defining State Groups

Often when formulating queries, you may wish to query for any of a group of states. ProblemTracker allows you to do this by defining State Groups. A State group is a collection of workflow states that appears as a choice on the Query page.

To define a group of workflow states, press the "State Groups" button. On the page displayed, you can add a new group, or edit an existing group. To edit an existing group, press the Edit button, and then set or clear the check mark in the column labeled Include.

Workflow Properties

ProblemTracker allows you to define a default set of workflow properties. These workflow properties include specifying a user that is treated as the manager for a state and defining a default state. In addition to the defaults, these properties can be defined on a per-product basis.

A set of default Workflow Properties are defined in ProblemTracker. These default workflow properties are applied to each new product added to ProblemTracker via the Option Menus section. To modify the default workflow properties:

1. Click on the Define Workflow button in the ProblemTracker Administration section
2. In the Product Pulldown field at the top of the page, select "(*) Default", then click on the Workflow Properties button.
3. Modify the properties described below, then click OK to save your changes.

To set the workflow properties for a specific product:

1. Click on the Define Workflow button in the ProblemTracker Administration section
2. In the Product Pulldown field at the top of the page, select the product you wish to modify, then click on the Workflow Properties button.
3. Modify the properties described below. If you wish to apply the default workflow properties to a product, click on the "Load Default Values" button.
4. Click OK to save your changes

Properties
The following properties can be set for the default workflow properties or for a specific product.

State Managers

The manager of a state can receive notification email when certain events occur related to records in the database when they either enter or leave the state. They can also have records automatically assigned to them by the Task operation.

A state manager can be specified for each product, allowing you to assign different managers for the same state on a per product basis.

To assign the state managers for a product, select the desired product from the pulldown labeled Product: and click on the Workflow Properties button. The value *(Default) indicates that these are the default settings. The default settings are used as the template for each new product as it is added to the system.

Default State

The Default State indicates the state a problem record will be routed to when it is first added to the database. A Default State can be defined for each product, allowing you to configure different states for problem records that are added to the system on a per-product basis.

To specify a default state for a product, select the desired product from the pulldown labeled Product: and click on the Workflow Properties button. The value *(Default) indicates that these are the default settings. The default settings are used as the template for each new product as it is added to the system.

Alerts are email notification messages that can be sent automatically by ProblemTracker at a later date and time to remind a user or group about a record. Alert settings can be configured for each product. The alert settings defined for each product will be used when a new record is created using the Add page with a particular product selected. It is also possible to allow users to be prompted to configure the Alert settings during the Add operation. Information on configuring default Alert settings for a product can be found in the Administration section for the Alerts feature.