Oracle Workflow sends a notification to a role when the Workflow Engine executes a notification activity in a workflow process. The notification activity may designate the role as being responsible for performing some human action or may simply relay process-related information to the role. To successfully deliver a notification to a role, the role must be defined in the Oracle Workflow directory service.
As a member of a role, you can view a notification using any one of three interfaces depending on your role's notification preference setting in the Oracle Workflow directory service. You can receive an e-mail for each individual notification, receive a single e-mail summarizing all your notifications or query the Workflow Notifications Web page for your notifications. If you choose to receive e-mail, you can also choose the format in which you want to receive the e-mail messages. See: Setting Up an Oracle Workflow Directory Service and Preferences.
Each notification message can include context-sensitive information about the process and directions on how to respond to the notification, if a response is required. The message can also include pointers to Web URLs and references to Oracle E-Business Suite forms that allow the user to get additional information related to the notification.
Oracle Workflow sends your notifications in the language specified in your user preferences, if that language is set up in your installation. See: Setting Up Additional Languages.
Note: In Oracle E-Business Suite, you can select a session-level language in the login window, which overrides your user-level language preference for that session. However, Oracle Workflow still uses your user-level language preference to determine the language in which e-mail notifications are sent. You can use the Preferences page to set your user-level language preference, which is also stored in the ICX: Language profile option. See: Preferences.
In some cases, such as if you are away on vacation, you will not be able to view or respond to your notifications in a timely manner. Rather than create a bottleneck in a workflow process, you can take advantage of vacation rules, also known as routing rules or automatic notification processing rules, to direct Oracle Workflow to automatically manage the notifications for you.
Notifications can require that your response be signed by a password-based or certificate-based electronic signature.
Password-based signature - You must enter your Oracle E-Business Suite user name and password to sign your response.
Note: Oracle Workflow supports password-based signatures based on Oracle Application Object Library (FND) passwords. If your site has implemented single sign-on functionality and you need to enter password-based signatures, your system administrator must set the Applications SSO Login Types profile option to either Local or Both for you, and you must have a valid password defined in Oracle Application Object Library. Your single sign-on password can be different than your Oracle Application Object Library password. If so, you must use your Oracle Application Object Library password to sign notifications. See: Implementing Password-based Signatures with Single Sign-On.
Certificate-based digital signature - You must sign your response with a valid X.509 certificate issued by a certificate authority.
Note: To sign notification responses with certificate-based digital signatures, you must access the notifications in the Oracle Workflow Web pages using a supported version of Microsoft Internet Explorer. See: R12: Recommended Browsers for Oracle E-Business Suite, My Oracle Support Knowledge Document 389422.1.
Obtain an X.509 certificate and private key from a certificate authority. The certificate and key should be provided in a PKCS 12 file with an extension of .p12 or .pfx .
Obtain the certificate authority's root certificate and any intermediate certificates required for your type of certificate. Also, for each root and intermediate certificate, obtain a URL specifying the location from which the corresponding Certificate Revocation List (CRL) can be downloaded.
If your system administrator has already obtained and installed the root certificate for your certificate authority and the intermediate certificates for your type of certificate, you can skip this step.
Load the file containing your personal certificate and key onto the file system of your client PC, and import the certificate into your browser. For detailed instructions, please refer to the online help for your browser. In some cases the certificate authority may automatically import the certificate into your browser when you obtain the certificate.
Use the certificate management functions in your browser or operating system to export your personal certficate in the DER encoded binary X.509 format. The certificate should be exported as a file with an extension of .cer.
Give your system administrator the exported file for your personal certificate, as well as the root certificate for your certificate authority and the intermediate certificates for your type of certificate, if necessary. The system administrator must load these certificates into Oracle E-Business Suite before you can use your personal certificate to sign Oracle Workflow notifications. See: Loading Certificates for Digital Signatures.