Organization Overview

Business processes that require user interaction generally occur within the context of an organization. Defining an organization allows users participate in your business process once it is published and deployed. It also ensures that users can only perform activities appropriate to their role within the organziation. Each ALBPM Project must have an organization defined.

Within ALBPM an organization defines a hierarchical structure that reflects the real-world organization of your business. An ALBPM organization defines the way people are grouped and defines the roles or each group and individual.

The following table lists the elements of an ALBPM organization.

Element	Icon	Description
Organizational Units		Organizational Units are used to represent departments or divisions within the organization. Organizational Units can be defined hierarchically so that, for example, you can represent divisions within an organization, departments within a division, areas within a department, and so on. You can assign Participants, Calendars, and Business Parameters to an Organizational Unit. You can also deploy processes under an organizational unit.
Roles		Roles are used to represent functions performed by people related to the organization. Roles are assigned to participants or groups, and these assignments define the permissions the participants have when executing AquaLogic BPM tasks through WorkSpace.
Groups		Groups are collections of roles. In this way, it is possible assign multiple roles to participants in a single step. Groups may also contain other groups.
Participants		Participants are the actual people who participate in the organization, usually as end users of the BPM implementation.
Holidays		Holidays Define the organization’s non-working days. These rules inform the Process Execution Engine that there is an exception to the normal calendar rules on certain days of the year.
Calendars		Calendars define the organization’s work week and work schedule. Calendar rules can be assigned to organizational units.
Business Parameters		Business Parameters are used to maintain constant values defined either for the entire organization, or at the Organizational Unit level. These parameters are visible to all instances and all processes across the Organization. Although business parameters may be changed every once in a while, they are not meant to be used as variables. Rather, they provide a way of storing long-lived values, such as a sales tax rate, without having to hard-code them into PBL methods.

About Organizational Units
Organizational units are typically departments or divisions within an organization. Organizational units can be organized in a hierarchy.
Roles
A role in the organization is a title or job function which is associated to a set of activities performed by participants of the organization.
Parametric Roles
A role can be defined as parametric. A parametric role includes a parameter which can adopt one of a set of values defined with the role.
Groups
Groups are collections of roles. In this way, it is possible assign multiple roles to participants in a single step. Groups may also contain other groups.
Participants
Participants defined in the organization are all the people enabled to track and perform tasks of business processes designed and developed with Studio.
About Holiday Rules
Holiday rules are collections of holidays that can be applied to calendar rules.
Calendar Rules
Calendar rules define the work hours, time zone, and holiday rule assignment for organizational units.
Business Parameters
Business parameters are used to store long-lived information defined at the organization level.

Parent topic: Managing Your Organization