Blog- SoHo Dragon

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Thoughts in AgilePoint

With the death nail on InfoPath, there's a lot of talk on workflow and forms engines in SharePoint...We choose AgilePoint

Formotus is another option and they have a completely independent white paper that you can download from their web site.  Of course, it'll be totally independent, given that it's from their web site.  :)

The Good:- What’s really cool about the product

  1. 1.      UI:

-        User-friendly development.

-        Easy to deploy and use.

-        Neat Mobile friendly forms available

-        A parallel process of two applications possible using subprocess using no code.

-        SharePoint workflows in Agilepoint solve most purposes for which event receivers are needed.

-        Wide variety of controls available for various functionalities.

-        Different process models are available for different uses. I.e. E-forms, Sharepoint Forms, System  Integration, etc.

-        Can add Jquery/ CSS to controls easily through shared/ individual files.

Do you want Office 365 training?

  1. 2.      Runtime:

-        Detailed information about variables/fields used available at runtime.

-        Multiple data sources can be used at various events.

-        Running applications will continue to run when a new change is published, as a result of which the system doesn’t have to be brought down to deploy changes.

-        Can use APIs to access any kind of data from other resources.

  1. 3.      Product features:

-        SharePoint version independent will work with future versions.

-        Easy to be integrated into different systems because SharePoint, Salesforce has AgilePoint Dashboards available.

-        Log in using various Authorization methods possible. (OAuth2 covers a lot of authorization methods)

-        Very easy to export applications to other tenants and reuse them.

-        Globally reusable tokens can be created and exported to multiple applications increasing reusability.

-        Individual forms also can be exported and re-used across multiple applications and tenants.

  1. 4.      On Premise /Private Cloud

-        Multiple tenants possible on a private cloud

-        Can access data stored in XML and create various reports based on the data

The Bad:

  1. UI:

-        A canvas designed in a way that plain text cannot be placed on a form. It has to be in control.

-        Controls take up a specific size that cannot be changed in height. This does give a neater look but the desired look is difficult (I may be biased as this is easily possible in MS word/ Infopath).

-        Nesting controls is difficult except put in subforms which in turn do not support a lot of controls

-        Custom HTML controls rendering is difficult.

-        Autosave doesn’t happen and the UI becomes unresponsive at a time causing loss of data

  1. Runtime:

-        Lookups take a while to load.

-        Page submit actions can’t be modified.

-        Poor integration with IE

-        Offline modification of forms not possible

  1. Product Features:

-        Look and feel can’t be modified to look like SharePoint to maintain consistency

-        Difficult to integrate into SP if not using Agilepoint dashboards as a physical location of forms/tasks is not available

The Ugly:- What totally sucks

  1. UI:

-        Very poor support for multiple controls in design time and runtime. Hence not suitable for larger forms.

  1. Runtime:

-        Can't access forms from a physical location as forms are available as tasks. This is usually a major requirement by the client.

-        Can't access data on the forms anywhere hence can’t be put in reports easily.

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