The following illustration shows what happens when a BPEL process executes a People activity.
When a BPEL process executes a people activity, the task defined by the activity is routed to all potential owners and administrators defined by the task. Each user can claim a task to work on, making it unavailable for other users.
When the task owner completes the task by submitting the required information into a form, the output data is sent back to the process so that the next activity can execute.
Typically a BPEL process containing a People activity is an asynchronous, long-running process. Since the people activity effectively "invokes" a person, the expected response time is high. For this reason, when you design a BPEL process containing a people activity, you should make the process asynchronous to avoid probable Web service communication timeouts.