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AppFog (discontinued) vs. SharePoint Designer (discontinued)

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    AppFog (discontinued)

    Score6.6 out of 10
    N/AAppFog was a cloud-agnostic application and infrastructure management platform used to manage workloads across on-premises and third-party cloud environments. It has been discontinued.

    $0

    SharePoint Designer (discontinued)

    Score3 out of 10
    N/AMicrosoft's SharePoint Designer was a tool for developing SharePoint applications that has been discontinued.N/A
    Pricing
    AppFog (discontinued)SharePoint Designer (discontinued)
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    AppFog (discontinued)SharePoint Designer (discontinued)
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details
    More Pricing Information
    Features
    AppFog (discontinued)SharePoint Designer (discontinued)
    Platform-as-a-Service
    Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of AppFog (discontinued) and SharePoint Designer (discontinued)
    Feature
    AppFog (discontinued)
    6.5
    2 Ratings
    17% below category average
    SharePoint Designer (discontinued)
    -
    Ratings
    Ease of building user interfaces7.01 Ratings00 Ratings
    Scalability5.32 Ratings00 Ratings
    Platform management overhead6.02 Ratings00 Ratings
    Workflow engine capability6.01 Ratings00 Ratings
    Platform access control6.01 Ratings00 Ratings
    Services-enabled integration6.62 Ratings00 Ratings
    Development environment creation7.42 Ratings00 Ratings
    Development environment replication8.42 Ratings00 Ratings
    Issue monitoring and notification6.01 Ratings00 Ratings
    Issue recovery6.42 Ratings00 Ratings
    Upgrades and platform fixes7.02 Ratings00 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    AppFog (discontinued)SharePoint Designer (discontinued)
    Small Businesses
    IBM Cloud Foundry
    Score8.5 out of 10
    .NET
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    IBM Cloud Private
    Score9.6 out of 10
    .NET
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Enterprises
    AWS Elastic Beanstalk
    Score8.6 out of 10
    ASP.NET
    Score9.5 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    AppFog (discontinued)SharePoint Designer (discontinued)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    6.6
    (2 ratings)
    4.9
    (17 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Data Sharing and Collaboration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    Data Sources
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    AppFog (discontinued)SharePoint Designer (discontinued)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Discontinued Products
    It was very good to use in small scale projects. Considering the high end projects with many instances and multi-platform architectures, it is better to test before the application is deployed. I think few of the questions can be general - who are the system users and what size is the application focussing on? How much resources are required? Will the application require any additional services?
    Incentivized
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    Discontinued Products
    SharePoint does not provide, out of the box, a tool to create / update workflows from web. You have to use SharePoint Designer in order to create them. If you need to implement custom workflows for specific business processes, then SharePoint Designer is well suited. SharePoint Designer allows you to create workflows with task approval, email notifications, assign variables and update SharePoint Lists / Documents properties. In our company, we have created specific workflows for : - Purchase order - RH forms validation like annual employee review - Dematerialized existing forms and validation
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    Discontinued Products
    • Quick deployment of pre-built virtual machines
    • Some of the virtual machines also are readily available with a pack of softwares
    • Good Stability. Using it as a student, I have never experienced any downtime issues with the projects deployed on AppFog.
    Incentivized
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    Discontinued Products
    • 2013 Workflows - Loops: You can build loops to work while a value (not) equals something, or N number of times. You can insert Parallel Blocks to do multiple things at once, or to watch for multiple things, and when 1 thing finishes, cancels the others and moves to the next step or stage.
    • 2013 Workflows - Stages: Previously all we had were steps, which worked sequentially. With the Concept of Stages, we can create blocks of steps and based on the data collected during those functions, we can tell the workflow to go to a different Stage in the workflow based on a set of 1, or multiple, Conditionals in a transition area after each Stage. Giving you the power to develop multiple entire processes and skipping to the correct part of the workflow, rather than going through 20 conditionals to find out you needed to do action 31.
    • 2013 Workflows - REST API: the "Call HTTP Web Service" is a very powerful tool, but hard to understand if you have never seen it done, or have a guideline. It works very similar to the requirements in PowerShell to connect and get and post data to SharePoint using the Rest API. You can also use this to manage permissions on List Items, Lists, Sites, and Site Collections. Best part is when developed correctly, it is SUPER FAST!
    • Intentionally Building Infinite Loops: I have built multiple review process from Managing Certifications to Updating Published Documentation, that monitors when an Item, based on provided approved metadata, when the "Author" needs to review the document within the given amount of time. They will get e-mails with links asking if changes are needed. If not, it is routed to the Approving Executive, and the Workflow Automatically updates the Metadata to push out the review dates to the next date, based on metadata provided on how how often the document should be reviews. By using conditionals in the transition of stages, it basically starts over, and goes into a parallel block to allow the monitoring of multiple values of metadata to move to the next stage. Very Powerful when you want to automate these types of process. It truly is a "Set It and Forget It" process.
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    Discontinued Products
    • Though it is good and easy for developers, it lacks operational activities and monitoring tools.
    • It is easy to deploy WAR on AppFog with its console but sometimes it can lack on the performance and feasibility.
    Incentivized
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    Discontinued Products
    • In the newest version of SharePoint Designer, they have gotten rid of the Design view which makes what used to be quick and easy changes much more code-intensive. This makes it harder for non-IT users and is more risker for all SharePoint Designer users.
    • SharePoint Designer workflows have a lot of functionality, but there are also some crucial limitations, such as not being able to put lookup fields in email subjects or using parenthesis to separate/group logical conditions.
    • Although this goes along with the Design view, there really isn't a good user interface anymore for adding conditional formatting and styles in views/pages.
    Incentivized
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    Likelihood to Renew
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Discontinued Products
    It is a helpful tool that we use every day.
    Incentivized
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    Support Rating
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Discontinued Products
    Support is good from Microsoft. They are quite responsive when we raise a ticket but SP Designer support will be ended by Microsoft in the near future as they have got new techs like PowerApps and Flow to achieve the same functionality SP Designer does and even more than that.
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Discontinued Products
    Primarily because it used to have a good free tier earlier, which it does not anymore. It's simple, and things are available to use. Compared to it's competitors, it does has less features, but that kind of acts in its favor. That adds to the simplicity, and ease of use for a new user.
    Incentivized
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    Discontinued Products
    I haven't used anything else like this. I use different products for workflows and forms, but they aren't listed in the listings for this page. Instead of using it for workflows or forms (deprecated 2 years ago), I use Nintex. For everything else, I have what I need in the Modern version of SharePoint online
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    Discontinued Products
    • Our project was deployed with good efficiency and easily accessible.
    • The platform was much recommeded across the groups and peers.
    Incentivized
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    Discontinued Products
    • For my needs, I have not found SharePoint Designer useful for my day to day maintenance of SharePoint. It is useful for viewing all the objects that make up the SharePoint site.
    • It is not as intuitive in regard to setting up Workflows. I have yet to use it to set up workflows in SharePoint. Maybe if I needed more complex workflows, it would be beneficial.
    • I like to use SharePoint Designer for moving around files within SharePoint sites.
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots