Now that you understand how Tines powers intelligent workflows and how to spot intelligent workflow opportunities, let's explore the key components you'll use to build them.
Every intelligent workflow in Tines consists of four fundamental components: Stories, actions, tools, and events.
Stories: Your complete intelligent workflow
A story is the core building experience in Tines. Each story represents a complete process that orchestrates multiple actions to achieve a specific outcome. The Storyboard is the literal location within the Tines UI where you design and build the workflow, similar to a blueprint.
Stories allow you to:
Visualize the flow of information from start to finish.
See how each step connects to create a cohesive workflow.
Understand the overall structure of your workflow at a glance.
We'll dig into stories more later on in the Stories module.
Actions: The steps that make things happen
With stories as the blueprint, actions are the components that bring them to life.
Actions are the individual steps that actually make things happen in your workflow. Tines offers eight action types, each performing different tasks. We'll delve into each action type in more detail later in the Actions module.
By combining multiple actions within a story, you create a reliable sequence of events that automates manual tasks. Actions are the "moves" that carry out the plan defined by the story.
Tools: Extend what you can build
Tools are features that extend what you can do beyond just the core logic of actions. They provide you with additional ways to interact with your stories and, more broadly, your workflows.
We cover these tools' functionalities in more depth across our other learning paths; however, let's introduce them now so you can identify them more easily:
Events: The data that flows through your story
Events are the output generated by actions in Tines. Think of events as the information highway of your story. They carry the data from one action/tool to the next, ensuring that every step has the context it needs to do its job. We'll explain events in more detail later on in the Events module.