Use departments in processes

When working with processes, you might want to be able to use a unit or a department as, for example, the responsible contact for or as a contributor in a process. This would be instead of or in addition to adding individual actors in the process.

To use a unit or a department as an actor in a process, the unit or department must exist as a contact of the type Unit and this contact must be assigned an email address. Furthermore, to respond to tasks, employees must be set up as delegates for the department.

Say that on a regular basis you send out hearings to have one or more employees participate. But you may not know who in the department will actually deal with the hearing. If you use a department as an actor in the process, any employee who is set up as a delegate for the department can respond to the hearing.

Assign an email address to a department

In order for a department to receive tasks, the department must have an email address. To assign an email address to a department, you simply add the email information to the department contact inWorkZone Client. For more information, see Manage contacts in theWorkZone Client User Guide.

Set up delegates for a department

Delegates are employees in a department that should be able to access the smarttasks that are sent to the department.

Delegates are set up on the contact in WorkZone Client. For more information, see Add, edit or remove delegates for a contact in the WorkZone Client User Guide.

Prerequisite: To work with delegates, you need to be assigned the PROCESSADM role. The PROCESSADM role allows you to manage delegates for all contacts.

For more information, see Work with delegates.

Allow access to delegates in Outlook

Delegates for a unit can be allowed access to the unit's mailbox from Microsoft Outlook. By setting up delegate access from Microsoft Outlook, you can give someone permission to act on your behalf and thus access user tasks from Microsoft Outlook.

For more information about how to manage delegates' access to a mailbox, see Manage another person's mail and calendar items in Microsoft Office Support.

If access from Microsoft Outlook is not set up for an employee, the employee cannot access user tasks from Microsoft Outlook. However, the employee can still access tasks from the Process Overview.