Bonita is an open-source business process and workflow management platform created by the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science. It is available as a free community edition or as a commercial subscription product.
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OnBase
Score 8.1 out of 10
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OnBase by Hyland is an enterprise content management platform with business process and case management capabilities. It is modular by design and allows users to tailor the solution to their specific requirements.
Well suited for low code/no code applications centered around approval flows. It has built-in task management for users to see their pending actions, comments, statuses, etc. It has a very nice design for process flows. Less appropriate may be for generic type applications with complex screens and logic within those screens that need a lot of data to process.
OnBase is a content services solution for organizations that need high visibility to documents or information across multiple teams or departments. It supports users' access control, workflow functionality with transaction history, electronic document retention, and destruction documentation. Hyland can support the organization for implementations or solutions, or the organization can utilize the education services and build out the solution themselves.
Bonita seems particularly suited for processes requiring a great deal of human interaction. Its user model allows you to control access to business processes in a fine-grained way. This allows for business processes to move smoothly between users and services as the process advances.
The definition and usage of custom forms from the latest version of Bonita seems particularly powerful. It allows for a thorough customization of the look-and-feel and does not require complex developments.
The web interface and administration section have greatly improved in the latest versions. Installation and configuration of processes has become more flexible and more structured. The administration section gives a good view on failed processes, allowing to analyse problems in an efficient way.
There is a learning curve beyond the boot camps that needs to be addressed with more structured curriculum.
The full stack technologies are industry standard, but these [are] challenging to learn and could use a learning path and orientation. There's probably opportunity for third-parties here to help with learning and adoption.
I personally find the user inferface to be obnoxious and obtuse.
When we have issues it is often hard to resolve the problem as there are many variables such as file types, DPI, and scanner setting that combine to make it hard to pinpoint trouble spots.
The upgrade process has always been a nightmare for our team. We are not on the latest version now due to this issue.
OnBase has become a core part of our enterprise solutions toolkit due to its ever-growing integration capabilities. Any business process that produces or tracks documents or object entities can be modeled and managed within OnBase and used to supplement almost any line-of-business system that we use.
Bonita Platform has allowed us to develop GUI relatively fast using its UI Designer while being able to seamlessly integrate our business logic in Java in a BPMN2 process diagram. It gives a nice productivity boost but still requires programming know-how to be able to deliver the final solution to your business problems.
You get out of something what you put into it. You reap what you sow! If an organization will spend time setting the solution up, dedicating staff to its development and ongoing support, and always keep the end-user in mind during development, you will have one of the most well-received solutions in your organization. So many organizations that I speak with stand up a solution but don't commit someone to its upkeep and development. It is vital that you have the staff to work within the solution on a daily basis.
Engine itself is efficient enough for most cases I dealt with. It can also be extended by clustering. I have done performance tests with JMeter and only managed to induce the crash of... JMeter. If there are efficiency issues they usually concern bad design/implementation of created apps or bottlenecks in integrated systems. Although I have met two cases with efficiency loss.
1. Java 7 related PermGen saturation caused by big number of installed apps (there is no jar dependency reusal between apps option).
2. Big number of waiting event handlers in processes stresses the database.
This rating is a compromise because I technically have 2 tiers of support. I go through a re-seller that I give a (10). I send an email and receive acknowledgment within minutes. For the few times we need to contact Hyland for assistance, it sometimes takes a couple of days to receive a response - and then the first tier might go back and forth a dozen times through email instead of initiating a phone call. And for an advanced issue, they take too long before they forward to an evangelist or someone more knowledgeable that is able to assist. I give that process an (8).
The trainer was very knowledgeable and was a Hyland employee. The training was at their corporate headquarters, so it allowed our team to become familiar with organization and culture.
Using Hyland professional services to assist with the implementation made things much easier. They have the knowledge and experience to get the system live as users are expecting
The version of SharePoint we were utilizing was not very practical. We oftentimes had issues with archived documents, where they could be found or opening them all together. It seemed the older the document the harder it was to access when logged into SharePoint. This is critical in our business as we need to behave full access to documentation sent and received for an owner's account.
Respect of BPMN standard over the long term. Good enhancements by Bonitasoft for new use cases, for example the introduction of a real form editor even if it has been technically difficult to manage. Once done though, we have far greater possibility of human interaction.
OnBase provides a very reliable ECM platform for the company.
OnBase helped to remove the dependency on paper files and file folders. This saved real estate cost as well as facilitated the ability to work from anywhere.
OnBase made same day processing of all incoming and outgoing documents a reality.
