What are your experiences in using AgilePoint as your workflow/BPM engine?

Question

We are in the process of migrating our workflows from Livelink and SharePoint to AgilePoint. If anyone has had experience in using AgilePoint, would you mind sharing your experiences?

For example:

• What are some gotcha's you've encountered?
• Have you found any particular aspect of AgilePoint especially useful?
• Have you found any particular aspect of AgilePoint especially useless?

Good, bad, indifferent experiences are all welcome as this will be marked as a community wiki.

Answer 1

Our consulting company is a Microsoft Gold and Open Text partner. I play the role of a lead workflow expert assisting clients with creating workflows in both products. From my experience, AgilePoint's workflow capabilities definitely surpass what SharePoint and Livelink can and will ever offer. Simply because SharePoint and Livelink (Content Server as what they will or are calling it now) are meant to be collaborative repositories, not workflow tools. Yes, they will have workflow capabilities, however, they will not come close to what 3rd party alliance type vendors will provide - because that is their bread and butter. We are currently using AgilePoint with both SharePoint and Livelink and are in the process to include AgilePoint as a 3rd party workflow tool in a few large and small engagements that we will be closing soon.

Below are elements about AgilePoint which I've found useful:

1. From a business analyst or development perspective, its a workflow creation environment that myself and other tech and non-tech folks are used to - Visio. If you know visio well, AgilePoint's ramp up time will be minimal compared to other vendors. you'll hear agilepoint boast about their "model driven architecture" and visio's palette environment being the big reason why.

2. Change management - very easy to update processes, migrate to new processes, and change/update processes in-flight.

3. Task management - slick UI that allows for an admin to quickly search on specific processes and all tasks associated with that process. I like the fact that there is a central place I can quickly access if I need to get to a specific process.

4. Non-technical business user empowerment - this would obviously depend on the governance of your organization, but business users can be empowered to create a whole process, deploy to a testing or staging environment and then test their processes as proof-of-concepts prior to go-live.

5. integration and extensibility - So here, pretty much out the box, i believe they include a few agileparts(visio stencil web services) that allow you to quickly integrate with ERPs(SAP, etc) and/or you can create your own stencil to integrate with a 3rd party custom app. for example for a few of my projects, I will most likely have a developer create a few custom agileparts to integrate with a bunch of manufacturing or retail apps. what i like about this is that, once you create this stencil, you can re-use in any workflow you're working on.

6. Underlying schema - so the underlying foundation of agilepoint is that you can create custom forms, sharepoint lists, or "agileforms" to create your process flows. here's what i like about this, the "connectors" between these forms and the workflow is essentially XML, so that means that whether you decide to user AgilePoint for 3 years and then move on to something else, all that XML is saved so that you don't have to worry about losing data. All this is linked to your SQL or whatever db your organizations decides to use.

7. architecture - what stuck out for me also was how AgilePoint is installed, it will NOT sit on your SharePoint or Livelink server, it actually sits separately and uses connectors to link with Sharepoint or other repositories, hence the upgrades and patches you will do on these CMS's does not affect how the agilepoint workflow is performing.

As far as what i've found as gotchas, hmm, i think there are a few nuances to look out for when creating new process that can sometimes confuse the heck out you. for example if you change the name of a workflow, it will actually create a whole new process and if you're not savvy enough to catch it, you'll spend at least an hour figuring out what the heck you did wrong. but this is one of those things that once you realize and learn, it wont be a an issue, just something to pay close attention to. I think I can safely say that I haven't really found anything fundamentally wrong with the product. I know Gartner had an issue with AgilePoint's "SOA Initiatives" and I tried to get more info from Gartner, but didn't see anything compelling enough for me to steer away from this product. Forrester has good things to say about it :). so if you dont like gartner, there's always forrester right? :)

I'm sure there are other things, i haven't caught yet, but objectively speaking, i think this is a solid product and will be around for a long time. Ask them about their growth strategy if you want a higher sense of comfort.

Good luck! You're welcome to contact me directly if you like. Lateef Shariff la.shariff1@gmail.com

Answer 2

Quick disclaimer - I work for a MS partner that is also an AgilePoint partner. Overall the product is good which is why we implement it for solutions.

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

1. UI:

   • User friendly development.
   • Easy to deploy and use.
   • Neat Mobile friendly forms available
   • Parallel process of two applications possible using sub process 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 available for different uses. I.e. E-forms, Sharepoint Forms, System Integration etc.
   • Can add Jquery/ CSS to controls easily through shared/ individual files.

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.

3. Product features:

   • SharePoint version independent will work with future versions.
   • Easy to be integrated into different systems because SharePoint, Sales force have AgilePoint Dashboards available.
   • Log in using various Authorization method 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 application increasing reusability.
   • Individual forms also can be exported and re-used across multiple applications and tenants.

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:
   • Canvas designed in a way that plain text cannot be placed on a form. It has to be in controls.
   • Controls take up a specific size which cannot be changed in height. This does give a neater look but 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 time causing loss of data
2. Runtime:
   • Lookups take a while to load.
   • Page submit actions can’t be modified.
   • Poor integration with IE
   • Offline modification of forms not possible
3. Product Features:
   • Look and feel can’t be modified to look like SharePoint to maintain consistency
   • Difficult to integrate in 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.
2. Runtime:
   • Cant access forms from a physical location as forms are available as tasks. This is usually a major requirement by the client.
   • Cant access data on the forms anywhere hence can’t be put in reports easily.
   • Forms as saved in XML... not a DB, so you need to get the data in a DB first to do real reporting on it