Live-Action:
Actions are EmpowerID Operations. It represents operations that can occur against an item.
Some examples of actions are adding users to groups, creating mailboxes, updating user attributes, or even viewing certain objects such as EmpowerID pages and reports.
EmpowerID has an actions pane, where a user can click to start an action. The actions pane is visible on the right side of the image below.
Live actions are actions that are completed immediately in a synchronous way. For example, in the above image, the action being used is “Create Management Role Definition” and this action finishes immediately after the user clicks on the link. Therefore, Live actions do not run as a background process.
Background Processes:
The background process is quite different than Live actions. The background process, unlike live actions, does not finish immediately but runs in the background for some time.
For example, License assignments are processed by the Fulfilment Queue, which is a daemon job that runs in the background. From start to finish, it takes the queue approximately 10 minutes to complete license assignments.