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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Process Street
Score 8.5 out of 10
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Process Street in San Francisco offers their application which allows teams to create simple recurring checklists, collaborate around them and track as they’re completed.
Very good : to design and execute business processes with just a few data. You can use BDM and it’s easy. It’s really easy to get data from external applications using custom connectors. less appropriate : if you use complex BDM tree objects, using them in form can significantly decrease performance. Be careful to follow guidelines that are given in Bonita Documentation.
Process Street has been amazing for an agency like mine where I know how I want things done, and I have the expertise to execute, but I can't clone myself. When I was away or sick no one knew how to continue the projects or they wouldn't do it the way I wanted or expected. However, everything was inside my brain. I was able to strategize and outline these processes, including writing emails that can be sent at certain specific times, etc. so my team can continue to operate at the same quality or better even when I'm not around. It has also helped me find redundancies and missing items that I had no clue about.
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.
Some of my processes require sending a templated email. I currently jump into my email client for that. I would like to be able to easily trigger that email from Process Street.
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.
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.
Since my last login into the platform, the latest update made the app much easier to use and learn. It's incredibly clean, and everything is exactly where it should be location-wise. You can tell they listen to their user base for features.
The Bonita platform is by far the most complete and flexible solution as a BPM suite with the added advantage that the Community edition is usable for production deployment. From a cost perspective, Bonitasoft licenses the subscription edition per server with no limitations as to hardware, users, processes, etc.
We did not evaluate any alternatives to Process Street prior to implementing it. I had been searching for this particular software solution for years but didn't find anything quite as flexible until this came across my desk unexpectedly.
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.
Process Street has been a time saver, I notice we are more able to quickly complete the processes that have been documented in Process Street, compared to ones we still have in our heads.
Process Street allows us to document our business processes so we can delegate the work to less experienced staff, and free up the time of our more experienced staff to work on more complicated projects/accounts.