Patent ID: 8694895

Claim:
A method for enabling interactions of a business process application with a general-purpose email client, the method comprising: receiving, by the email client, an electronic mail (email) message from the business process application, wherein the email message comprises a process ID, and wherein the process ID associates the email message with a workflow in the business process application; determining whether the email message is an approval message, wherein the approval message requests input for applying to the workflow in the business process application, wherein the determination of whether the email message is an approval message is performed by analyzing a message class of the email message; upon determining that the email message is an approval message, adding user interface (UI) controls related to a functionality required to respond to the approval message and disabling UI controls that are not required to respond to the approval message, wherein the UI controls are added to a toolbar of a window of the general-purpose email client displaying the approval message upon opening the approval message, and wherein the user interface controls are to indicate the following responses: Approve, Reject, Cancel, Delegate, Extend, Retire, Complete, Not Complete, Add, Remove, Expire, and Join; receiving a response to the request in the approval message; determining an endpoint to send the response by determining a type of the email message and comparing the type of the email message and correlating the determined type of message with a list that identifies one or more endpoints based on the type of the email message; and sending the response to the determined endpoint for processing the response, wherein the response comprises the process ID to enable the business process application at the determined endpoint to associate the response with the workflow.