Workflow is often a company-wide operation and therefore often involves more than one system. The ability to integrate data and triggers from external systems is critical where business process automation and efficiency is priority

WorkflowFirst provides many ways to integrate third party systems.

The workflow stage is controlled by a field that is added when the application is published. The field is named based on the workflow name (with spaces removed) followed by State. So, for example, if I named my workflow "Ticket System", then the workflow state will be held in a field called TicketSystemState.

The value of this field will be the name of the stage, with spaces removed.

This makes it very easy to initiate a workflow or to control the stage of a workflow from an external system. The system can simply utilize the XML interface described in Using the XML API , for example, and update a record to set the state to a particular value. This would then send out any email notifications and start the workflow from that stage.

There are many other ways to interact with workflow, and these are covered in depth in Connectivity.