Hi team,

Just another couple of small quality of life / UX improvement for administrators of large Laserfiche on premises implementations. Not too long ago some amazing functionality was introduced at the Monitoring screen for Laserfiche Forms instances.

These amazing administrator controls included:

1) (Optional) Error details on an suspended/failed activity/task/issue

2) Ability to Retry an activity/task/step

3) Ability to Skip an activity/task/step

4) Ability to Interrupt an activity/task/step

5) Ability to Stop/Terminate an instance

6) Quick access to Edit the process

7) Quick access to Reports for the process

8) Ability to change the Columns for the monitoring view

However, some of these controls are only available from the Monitoring view and if made available in some other screens, could serve to save administrators a lot of time!

Instance > History Tab 

When you open History view for an instance, you can right-click on any activity that is active/suspended and perform some of the monitoring controls like Retry/Resend Notifications etc. This is cool, and useful for short, straightforward processes.

However, when your process become relatively complex, so too does the audit trail. In some cases, processes can last for months with pages of completed and in progress activity, gateways, reminders and notifications.

Therefore, to save an administrator time in troubleshooting issues - here's some improvements I'd like to suggest for the History view tab:

1) Error Details Button: Just like the Monitoring view, it would be hugely beneficial to provide the same information modal pop up at both the top of the History view page and at the line level specifically for that activity inside the instance.

This tiny improvement saves administrators from clicking the suspended process link from an error notification, copying the instance ID, clicking monitoring, then typing the ID to do a search, then selecting the Error Details button to find out why something was "suspended".

2) Retry Button: I'm sure this was overlooked because again, this functionality only becomes relevant when you have pages upon pages of history / parallel activities going on for an instance, however, to save an administrator from scrolling to find Retry-able objects without using Ctrl+F and "In Progress", bringing this button and its subsequent summary modal to the History view would also be hugely beneficial. 

3) Stop/Terminate Instance Button: So again, like the Error Details button, if we're notified of a problem with a Suspended activity, half of the time we can fix it, the other half of the time the process might need to be restarted or submitted again. In all instances, having the option to terminate the instance from the History view without having to as mentioned earlier, copy the instance ID, go to monitoring, search, select and terminate would be a quality of life improvement for administrators.

Task View > Instance Controls
Sometimes users make irreversible mistakes in their submissions which generally results in resubmission/restarting the process. The Stop/Terminate button has been immensely beneficial for managing this safely, and with the ability to leave a reason code. So, if we look at how these types of requests are typically handled, it normally starts with a forwarded task email / notification email from the participant who is requesting that an erroneous submission be terminated. Like mentioned earlier, administrators are often clicking that link to view the task, copying the instance ID, opening monitor view, searching and then stopping the process. My suggested quality of life improvement is to conditionally show process controls at the Task level for Process Administrators so they can easily terminate instances (as shown below) relatively easily.

That's it for today. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk! :D

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