The Workflow Engine is responsible for managing and executing steps in an administrator-defined workflow and keeping track of state information. The Workflow Engine persists the information in the workflow runtime database.
The Workflow Engine supports features such as email based approval and email notification. During the course of workflow execution, the Workflow Engine can send one or more email messages to notify users of changes in the state of the workflow. You can edit an email template and use this template for email notifications. At runtime, the Workflow Engine retrieves the template from the database and replaces tags with dynamic text suitable for the notification. For more information, see Section 13.0, Setting Up Email Notification Templates.
In addition, the Workflow Engine also provides functionalities such as logging, generating reminder and escalation notifications, retrying failed processes, and heartbeat monitoring. The Workflow Engine gathers workflow metrics and lets you monitor an approval flow process. The Workflow Engine can also be clustered in your deployment to overcome the fail-over scenario and to manage the workload.