Bosbec WE Introductory Course

Bosbec Workflow Engine

Bosbec Workflow Engine (or Bosbec WE) is a powerful platform that, together with Workflow Builder, allows you to build sophisticated digital solutions using ready-made components and interfaces without necessarily having any previous programming knowledge. However, if you have some background in programming, you will probably recognize many of the concepts used by Bosbec WE.

Bosbec WE is designed to receive data through different channels and process or react to it based on the rules you build in the Workflow Builder (WFB).

Triggers

All workflows are started using a Trigger. There are many variations, but they are generally started by something happening: a file is uploaded, a message is received, someone responds to a form, or an API call is made.

Triggers listen to these events using “Channels.” The trigger can listen to everything on a particular channel or filter out the events you are not interested in. For example, the channel may receive all SMS to a specific phone number, but the trigger should only run when the SMS contains a particular keyword.

Jobs

One or more Jobs are then connected to the triggers. There are many jobs to choose from to perform the tasks required to achieve the desired result in a workflow. These tasks can be divided into different categories:

1. Data Processing: Processes data by retrieving, transforming, and storing.
2. Communication: Sending messages and notifications to users via various media, such as email, SMS, or app.
3. Integration: Integrates with other systems using API calls or FTP access.
4. Automation: Schedules or creates loops to do a task multiple times.
5. Decision-making: Routes the workflow and branches out to perform different tasks depending on configured rules.

There are several jobs to choose from in these categories, and the most appropriate job usually depends on the desired outcome, but we have some jobs that we often recommend. These are available in the interfaces when dragging out a new job.

Units

To access the data in subsequent workflow executions, it must be saved in one of three places: Units, the data log, or the file library. This section looks at units as these are the most common places to save data, but we go into more detail in Episode 5.

Units store data and can be divided into “Data units” and “Channel units.” A “channel unit,” or contact unit, is a unit with one or more contact channels stored and usually represents a person the user may want to communicate with.

A contact unit may also have metadata stored that can describe it further. Examples of such data can be a department the person works in, if the person is on vacation, or an employment number.

A “data unit,” or storage unit, is the same as a contact unit but has no contact channel stored and usually does not represent a person but is instead used as a general storage area for data and can represent anything. However, these units also use metadata that is stored with a key and value. A data unit can, for example, represent an individual case in incident management, a queue in a store, or a department in the company.

Bosbec WE has more resources available, but the ones we’ve covered here are more than enough for this chapter! The following parts are presented in video format and where we go through different Bosbec WE concepts by looking at various workflow examples. Links to these can be found below!