11 // Formable Compute

In last week’s edition I shared a draft on Formable data. This week it’s a draft of another of Formable’s main concepts.
I won’t start building this one anytime soon. This is just part of the long term vision.

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Formable Compute

Automate simple tasks or lay out complex business workflows.

Formable is the one place you store all your data. The formable data model and formable views allow you to build powerful custom software experiences. Those two components will let you build topnotch knowledge management solutions. 

How it works

In Formable, whenever the computer computes something, that’s an action. 

As a user, you can define custom actions or use predefined ones. For example, you could

• Automatically (re-)schedule tasks in your calendar

• Send yourself a notification email when someone assigns you a todo item

Actions might run when you click around the app, or when things happen while you’re not necessarily actively using the app. 

They could be fired

• by views, e.g. when clicking a button

• when a collaborator creates a new relation to your data

• on a certain schedule

Actions can manipulate your data, and call external services and even other actions. 

So they are composed of a trigger, conditions, and calling other actions and manipulating data, like creating a new block.

They can await delays and additional conditions over time. That allows human inputs by your team in between parts of your workflows. 

What does an automation look like?

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You can build them through the automation UI, similar to hundreds of other vendors building workflow automation software.

No code – low code

Whatever you build with the UI is just code, so jump into that and write your automations instead of using the graphical user interface.

Some more [areas of] examples:

• Sales / marketing / CRM automations

• HR: on boarding / hiring processes

• API: integrate with your own app

• …

And of course the crazy ones you’ll come up with

[would be cool to be able to copy these to one’s own account straight from this page].