We have a Lotus Notes / Domino workflow application that sends an email to managers with a doclink to the database application. Once they click on the doclink they can either accept or refuse the a request.
However, the situation right now is starting to get a little political. Top management want to approve or refuse the request through the Blackberry device. They do not want to go back to thier laptops/workspace to approve or refuse the request. It is considered a waste of time.
My question, is there a way that I can accomodate this requets?
As i know, there is a tool to replicate Notes db’s to the Blackberry, but from my point of view, you should enable the form to support WML or some less HTML (Blackberry comes with a WML enabled Browser).For this, you should replace the doclink with an URL and the HTML page behind this should detect the clienttype and render a page based on this clienttype (bad news is, that the server with this link must be either located within your DMZ or your Blackberry must be able to access your corporate network).
yes, it is possible to extend the workflow to the BlackBerry environment. The main thing to bear in mind is that pre-4.0 no JavaScript is/was supported. With 4.0 onwards supports JavaScript 1.3.
Also bear in mind what the approval or refuse page would look like. the last thing you’d want overload the UI, keep it simple would be my advice.
For others searching who happen on this post, our company has a product called CoexLinks which handles this conversion automatically so that Blackberry (and other mobile device) users can have their doclinks served up as URL links. The URL is customizable, so it is easy to have it send you to a page designed for mobile approvals.