Patent ID: 7171373

Claim:
A workflow management system for creating and delivering output material, comprising: computational resources; at least one system computer readable medium including ajob status table, a database table, and content files; and code executed by the computational resources and implementing a first and second workers, wherein the code is executed to perform operations, the operations comprising: generating a customer record to include fields specifying at least one product, customer preferences, and a selected delivery option indicating a method to deliver generated output material on the product specified in the customer record; adding a job record including a status field to the job status table for the customer record; setting the added job record status to a first status; processing a selected job in the job status table; invoking the first worker if the selected job has the first status; generating, with the first worker, output material from processing the product and customer preference fields in the customer record for the selected job by (i) processing a template including queries of records in the database table; (ii) accessing at least one value in a field in one customer record to include in one query from the template against the database table; (iii) applying the query against the database table to determine a record associated with one content file and including fields matching the query; (iv) accessing the content file associated with the determined record; and (v) generating the content from the at least one accessed content file into the template, which forms the output material; setting the status for the selected job in the job status table to a second status after generating the output material with the first worker; invoking the second worker if the selected job has the second status; determining, with the second worker, a selected one of a plurality of delivery options from the customer record for the selected job; and transmitting, with the second worker, the output material via the determined delivery option to the customer specified in the customer record.