Summary

In some cases, the "owner" of a Workflow Step is someone that does not have an account in LearningBuilder. These people are referred to as "external contacts".

For example, a Practitioner might provide the email address of a previous employer during an application. The review process might require that employer to provide an attestation confirming the employment history. In that scenario there would be a Workflow Step that is "owned by" the previous employer, and they would automatically receive an email with a link allowing them to act on the Workflow to provide that attestation.

See also: Assigned Tasks

Overview

LearningBuilder supports multiple ways of allowing people to perform the tasks that are expected of them.

The primary mechanism of doing this is by configuring a Workflow Step to be "completed by" a specific Role. This configuration creates a "queue" of Workflow Instances that anyone with that Role is able to work on. For instance, if there is a pool of Reviewers, and they are all capable to reviewing an arbitrary application, then assigning the Review step to the "Reviewer" role means that each Reviewer can pull pending applications from the queue when they need something to do.

It is also possible to configure a Workflow Step to be "completed by" someone that does not exist in LearningBuilder at all.

Business Case

The queue configuration supports a "pull" model where people pull items from a work queue according to their capacity. This is useful when all members of a given Role are equally qualified to work on a given task.

The External Contact configuration supports a "push" model where a Workflow Instance is assigned to someone that does not exist in LearningBuilder. They can then provide some information, after which the Workflow Instance is assigned back to a system user.

Configuration Overview

Add an /wiki/spaces/DOCS/pages/558629042 to a Workflow Step
Edit a subsequent Step of that same Workflow, and select "Assignee" in the To Be Completed By setting. Select the Assignee attribute you created in Step 1. Be sure to set up a notification email, or else the assignee will not have any way to take action.
When the Workflow is populated by the end user, the Email Address attribute will be populated with the assignee's email address. An email will be sent to that address containing a specially formatted URL that will allow the recipient to access the assigned task without requiring a LearningBuilder login.

Technical Details

When an /wiki/spaces/DOCS/pages/558629042 creates an assigned task, the system checks to see if that email address belongs to one and only one existing LearningBuilder member. If so, then the task is assigned to that Member. (In this case it becomes an Assigned Task)

If not, then the task is not assigned to any specific Member. In this case, the only way to access the task is through a specially formatted URL that contains the unique Access Code assigned to the task. This allows the owner of that email address to act on that task without requiring a LearningBuilder account.

Table	Column	Value / Notes
`WORKFLOW_INSTANCE_ASSIGNEE`	`PERSON_ID`	NULL, if the email address was not for an existing Member
`WORKFLOW_INSTANCE_ASSIGNEE`	`EMAIL`	The primary email address of the assignee
`ITEM_ATTRIBUTE_VALUE`	`VALUE`	The value of the Email attribute holds the email address of the assignee. This value must be kept in sync with the `EMAIL` value of the assignee record or the user will not be able to actually access the assigned task.

Requirements

All modern builds of LearningBuilder contain this feature

Related articles

Page:
External Contact (LearningBuilder Documentation)
- external-contact

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