Out of the box Windows Workflow provides the core engine necessary to build episodic processing.  What I mean by episodic is that the code in a particular business process does not execute all the way through.  Only portions (Activities) execute in episodes as events, etc. occur.  This allows workflows or business processes to start something and finish it maybe a week later.

In Aware Server you have the ability to build business processes that may require human interaction before continuing.  Take the sample below which is of a payroll business process where the paychecks are distributed across the network for processing using the DistributedWorkflowReplicatorActivity and then a human interaction is created (highlighted activity on the left) asking for the user who initiated the payroll job to please approve or reject the values computed during processing.  The workflow at this point completes its current episode and goes to sleep (dehydrates to persistence store).

Another thing Aware allows you to do is attach another workflow instance to your parent process to monitor each and every human interaction you create.  In the sample above the workflow to the right is monitoring the interaction created by the parent process.  The monitoring instance in this example will wait for 1 minute and then cancel the interaction which the parent process is monitoring as well unless the user tells us that he/she has started working on our interaction (In Progress).  If the interaction is canceled the parent process will determine that the payroll is already too stale and will cancel the entire run. 

What’s really powerful is that both workflow instances (parent and monitoring flow) are watching for correlated events on the same interaction.  In a later blog post I will cover how to make this possible and how we have simplified external workflow communication (ExternalDataExchangeServices).