Patent ID: 7693861

Claim:
A computerized method of establishing relationships between one or more entities of a workflow application and one or more entities of a customer relationship management (CRM) application, said computerized method comprising: receiving a request from a user input for designing a workflow process to perform an action on an entity of the workflow application, said workflow process defining a hierarchical structure for processing the entity, said workflow application being executable by a processor, said CRM application being executable by another processor, said workflow application lacking prior knowledge for interacting with the one or more entities of the CRM application; identifying at least one entity of the CRM application for establishing a relationship with the entity of the workflow application in response to the workflow process in the received request; generating, at the CRM application, metadata from non-hierarchical CRM application information associated with the at least one identified entity of the CRM application, wherein the generated metadata defines an interaction structure that fits the at least one identified entity of the CRM application to the defined hierarchical structure of the workflow application for processing the entity in the workflow process based on the metadata without specifying a specific workflow expression for processing the workflow process, said interaction structure including at least the following information: role access permission, role access privileges, role type, role limitations, role-to-role relationships, business role information, business entity information, information pertaining to a business entity hierarchy, and information pertaining to a relationship graph; receiving, at the workflow application, the generated metadata from the CRM application; and dynamically generating, based on the generated metadata, a workflow expression for the user to be processed in the workflow process between the entity of the workflow application and the identified entity of the CRM application to perform the action, said generating comprising identifying the business role information and the business entity information of the identified entity of the CRM application and associating the identified information with the entity of the workflow application.