ArcGIS Workflow Manager (formerly Job Tracking for ArcGIS [JTX]) is an extension to ArcGIS Desktop and ArcGIS Server that lets organizations develop and enforce standard, repeatable GIS workflows across the enterprise.
Workflow Manager greatly improves the efficiency of GIS operations by organizing and automating the relationships between the activities in a GIS project, including any non-GIS activities that are required. Workflow creation and management is centralized to ensure consistency across operations within the organization as well as with contractors.
With ArcGIS Workflow Manager, you can:
- Improve user productivity by automating common activities such as geoprocessing and version management and reducing repetition of production procedures.
- Ensure standardization and consistency across operations by quickly creating workflows using simple visual tools and centralizing workflow management.
- Automate and simplify workflow management using out-of-the-box, user-configurable tools.
- Easily track workflow status using reports.
- Integrate your GIS and other business applications by seamlessly incorporating non-GIS activities into your GIS workflows.
- Efficiently manage a dispersed workforce and assign activities by geography.
Workflow Management
You can define, organize, and standardize the individual tasks within a workflow; allocate staffing resources; automate tasks; and track the status and progress of jobs from beginning to end using ArcGIS Workflow Manager.
You can easily identify:
- Who is working on what
- What the status is
- Individual, group, and project progress
- Resource use and allocation
- Data changes
- Project updates
Job Tracking
Any action performed on the job, such as executing an edit feature step, is captured and logged in the administration database. This gives you a complete chronological registry of job-related information such as:
- All interactions with a job
- Changes to the state of the job
- Execution of a step or task
- Time-stamped comments
Version Management
ArcGIS Workflow Manager includes a comprehensive set of version management tools to facilitate simultaneous project workflows from a centralized geodatabase. It ensures the execution of:
- Long and complex geodatabase transactions safely
- Uninterrupted workflows
- Version assignments for the life of the job
- Data referencing
- Individual feature edit tracking
- Versioning maintenance
Multiple Data Warehouse Support
Using the multiple data workspace functionality, you can:
- Manage data distributed across multiple ArcSDE geodatabases with one ArcGIS Workflow Manager repository.
- Use data from varying departments or data stores within your organization to complete tasks within your ArcGIS Workflow Manager system.
- Configure each geodatabase connection as a data workspace in the ArcGIS Workflow Manager system.
History Tracking and Change Detection
ArcGIS Workflow Manager delivers rich support for the capture and storage of feature-level transactions using geodatabase archiving tools, which are ascertained when the job version is reconciled and changes are posted back to the master database. These records provide query access by job number, date, date range, or data layers to support QA process requirements.
Spatial Notifications
You can use the automatic e-mail notification tools to:
- Alert key people within your organization when changes are made to features within your database.
- Configure rules for how the e-mails will be triggered such as by changes to certain features, certain updates to a specific feature, or changes within a specified area.
Distributed Workforce
ArcGIS Workflow Manager lets organizations maintain multiple Workflow Manager repositories locally in different geographic regions for performance reasons, while allowing users at each location to continue working on the same set of jobs.
Reporting
A reporting engine gives you the ability to define and produce summary reports for your projects that are managed with ArcGIS Workflow Manager. The report output is stylized using XML style sheets (XSLT).