Through the use of Public Forms Flowingly has been able to allow for external parties to trigger workflows. With the addition of Public Workflows and External User steps we now have the capability to assign a step to any external party.
Note: This is a paid add-on. If you are interested in exploring the capabilities of this feature further, please get in touch with your Customer Success Manager or open a ticket at CustomerSuccess@Flowingly.net
Getting Started
As mentioned, any step after the first can be assigned to an External User. Once you have identified the relevant step, you can change the Step Type to "External User Step".
Once selected you can configure the form as if it were any other step. For obvious reasons you may want to be mindful of presenting certain information within these forms as the details contained within the External User steps will be, to a certain extent, publicly available.
In order to have these steps assigned to an External Actor we must first have an email address to send these to. This can be an email we hard-code into the form details (e.g. Invoicing@Customer.com) or a dynamic assignee from an Dropdown Field, Email Field, or Lookup Field in a previous step.
Select "Add Recipients" to configure the email address for the External User.
Within this pop-up menu you can add specific email addresses by typing them out and selecting "Add"
Or, use a Step/Form Field from a previous step in your Workflow.
Once we have determined the email address to send this task to we can then configure the email which will be sent to them once this step is reached.
Starting with the Subject of our email notification.
Much like the Custom Emails you can use Variables from previous steps to make this subject dynamic.
Following on from this the remaining options for email are much like the options you see within custom emails, with some slight differences.
By default the From Name and Reply To options will default to Flowingly Notifications and no-reply@flowingly.net respectively. These can be updated to reflect your organisations branding.
Additionally, the email contents can be edited and made to show dynamic responses based on your workflow.
One final aspect you can adjust is the message contained within the Action Button which will be what our external actors use to access the form.
By default this will contain "Click here" but you can adjust this if required.
Public Workflows in Action
Now we'll break down what using the External Actor steps look like from an end user perspective.
Once the relevant stage of your workflow is reached, your external actor will receive an email with the call to action regarding the task you have designed. This should look similar to the image below.
At this point the external user can complete their part of your workflow.
One aspect which we have added to this feature is the ability to save the form so that this can be returned to at a later date.
This also means that if this is sent to a shared mailbox that this task can be shared across a team.
Final Notes
As this feature is not intended for any internal users External User steps cannot be sent to users with the company or internal domain e-mail address.
E.g. Company domain = @Flowingly.net. Validation stops any users from the “@Flowingly.net” being configured as external actors. If you need anyone with this domain to complete a step within your environment they will need to be added as a user.