Over the past couple of weeks, we've gotten a couple of questions regarding our work on Automator Actions. Specifically of the 'Why bother, it is nothing but a fluff tool'. The problem is that Automator is so much more, and could be even more if more developers understood it's power. So I want to talk about a couple of examples I use right now, and a couple I have deployed to customers.
In terms of personal workflow automation, I have one that I use 15-20 times per day. Like most software developers, I have a 'support desk' system in which each customer support email goes into a customer relations manager and gets a 'ticket' number that the customer has. As I work a ticket, I like to keep the customer informed as to the progress of the ticket. So, as I work, I keep notes in the notes section of the ticket in the CRM tool. When I wrap up my notes for that ticket, I hit an icon on the dock and away goes an Automator workflow that does something that would take me a couple of minutes. First it grabs the current ticket number from the web browser I was using, then it downloads a PDF version of the ticket to attach to the email, then it creates an email to all of the associated parties (that isn't me), and places the current notes and the resolution if it is resolved, into the email. It then attaches the PDF, and sends the mail message.
Let's be stingy and say it saves 2 minutes per message, which is generous, because if I have to open Mail to look send the message, I'll end up reading some message there, and not doing the task as promptly. If I touch 15 customer tickets in a day, that's 30 minutes saved a day, 2.5 hours a week, so it's over one day per month saved by an automator workflow that took just about 2 hours to create and test.
The rule that gets run by Entourgae when these emails come in actually generates the tickets and sends our the number back to the customer is also an Automator workflow, generating an XML file from the email, posting it via SOAP to the CRM application, returning the ticket and a PDF copy of the ticket to the customer, saving a staff person from manually entering the tickets as they arrive.
Unfortunately, most of the why bother crowd says this is just as easy in AppleScript, and it is, if you already know AppleScript. Not too many people know AppleScript that well, though. That doesn't really solve the problem of making workflow automation easy for anyone though. Automator does make it easier (not easy, you still have to think, and sometimes wiring it all together can be disconcerting, but with little experience, Automator becomes a VERY powerful tool. So that is why we are going down this path, to build something for the wider market than those who have learned AppleScript.