Oracle EBS / MS Outlook Integration Options for Workflow Approvals

Question

My organization is using Oracle Applications 11.5.10.2 and is currently in the process of upgrading to R12.
I've recently been asked to investigate and provide options for stream-lining users' ability to respond to workflow notifications from within Oracle Applications, removing the need for users to have to log into Oracle or send an e-mail response to the workflow notification mailer.
Is anyone aware of any out-of-box mechanisms or 3rd party bolt-on solutions that would achieve this?
For example, rather than a receiving a workflow notification e-mail asking an approver to log into Oracle to approve a purchase order, time card, recruitment request, or expense report, my business users would like to be able to approve or reject the approval directly from within MS Outlook.
One option would be to utilize the inbound workflow e-mail processing (e.g. for the user to send a reply e-mail response back to workflow notification mailer), but I'd like to know if there are any other options - such as an add-in within MS Outlook that would prevent the business user from having to send an e-mail response message.
Greatly appreciate any ideas or suggestions.
~Jeremy

Answer 1

The note id's provided above are very helpful for understanding how to control the two out-of-box mechanisms for responding to approval notifications
Option 1: Users click on the "Please click here to respond" hyperlink in the e-mail, log into Oracle Apps, and respond to the notification
Option 2: Users click on the "Accept" or "Reject" hyperlinks provided in the workflow e-mail notification, which creates an response e-mail notification containing the notification_id and response (e.g. accept or reject). The response gets processed by the workflow notification mailer.
My organization currently uses both both options (option 1 for some approval workflows, option 2 for others), and I'm familiar with how to toggle a particular workflow approval notification between these two options.
However, my organization wishes to pursue another option that would involve creating a composite application or enterprise application mash-up, accessible within MS Outlook, that would allow an Oracle apps user to see his or her list of open notifications (within Outlook) and respond to the notifications from either Outlook or our corporate intranet web site. We recently implemented an Identity Access Management solution and have a good link established between each LAN (MS Exchange) user account and his or her Oracle Apps user account.
To my knowledge, there is not out-of-box way to do this and it would require implementing a third-party bolt-on if one exists that would meet this need. Maybe one option would be to create a simple ADF application that would find open notifications in Oracle for the current user and wrap the seeded API's used to respond to the notification.
Please let me know if anyone else has any feedback or prior experience addressing a similar business need.