Hi Josh,
Thanks for you post – some good ideas and feedback here as usual.
Your idea of having a pre-job workflow is something we’ve already considered and it’s on our ever-growing list of things to do. Having a series of Q+A and/or workflow to work through BEFORE logging the job would be a handy tool. Similar to a trouble-shooting guide that leads you through a series of steps in order to fix the issue, and then if it doesn’t work out, you log the job (with a narrowed-down list of job templates) and the steps you’ve already gone through are documented etc… Lots of cool possibilities with this concept.
Modal Decision boxes (Message prompts that force a response). Yep, agreed – these are brutal, and demand to be satisfied right there and then. We’re looking at a potential solution to this by displaying the next/current workflow step in a “Workflow” side-bar, or dockable panel on the job screen, or possibly on the main window. This can display the decision, and the ability to answer it, without being a screen-hog. (so to speak).
This idea ties into the whole idea of making it more obvious that a job has workflow. Currently you have to either click on the Workflow tab, or hover over the Workflow button to determine this. Your idea of hiding/disabling the regular action buttons when a job has workflow is a good idea. We’ll definitely consider this, or something like this going forward.
If there was a work-flow side-bar, this could also be used for your quick-entity-link / lookup, and display other information.
We'll check out those other issues you mentioned also.
Thanks again for your suggestions. Would be great to hear from other HelpMaster users to hear how they are currently using the workflow, and what improvements it needs.
The next release of HelpMaster already has some great new workflow features, so this is a topic that we’re keenly interested in getting right.