What is the difference between Action & Workflow?

hi,
What is the difference between Action & Workflow?
regards,
babu

Hi,
Actions
Actions are important for maintaining and improving business relationships. You can schedule and start predefined processes with the Actions component by means of user-definable conditions from transaction and marketing objects.
You can tailor the type and time of actions to the requirements of your customers and the processes in your company. This component enables you to match your service, sales and distribution management, and your campaign management even more closely to customer needs, and, simultaneously, to automate them
In simple words Actions are automatic actions that are configured to occur in business transactions (activity, sales order, quotation etc.) as a result of particular condition like change of status to let us say "in process" from "open".
Workflow:
The automation of a business process, in whole or part, during which documents, information or tasks are passed from one participant* to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules.
*participant = resource (human or machine)
SAP Business Workflow is the R/3 tool for handling the process automation within R/3 or between R/3 systems and other systems involved in the business process. It is flexible enough to handle ad hoc processes such as the circulation of an electronic document. It is robust enough to handle mission critical process in the production system such as the creation of a material master.
The different R/3 applications supply standard workflows for the commonly occurring processes. Once these workflow templates are activated, they are ready for immediate use. A complete set of workflow tools, including the workflow editor and workflow generation wizard, are provided to enhance these standard workflows or create new workflows. These tools are complemented with transactions for monitoring, tracking and the statistical analysis of the processes.
Because the business process often does not step at the R/3 boundary, various interfaces and third party tools are available for extending the process across systems.

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