Google AppMaker was a low-code development environment. App Maker is included with G Suite Business and Enterprise editions, as well as with G Suite for Education. It was discontinued in early 2021.
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HCL Domino
Score 5.0 out of 10
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HCL Domino (formerly IBM Domino, and before that Lotus Domino) is an enterprise application development platform, boasting mobile-app capabilities to enterprise authentication and a companion low-code app builder called Domino Volt.
App Maker is exceptionally strong when you need things to just get done, but your internal development team has a full queue. Or maybe you don't even have an internal development team! If you need a check-in system, an applicant tracking system, an office cleaning checklist with notifications and reports, etc. you can use App Maker to throw something together and make sure your team can use it. You can also collaborate on it, so teams can make this part of their process improvement goals.
Domino is best in medium-sized businesses of 20-100 employees. It's too complicated to implement in very small companies unless you have good external resources. It scales up very well for larger companies but the pressures of users wanting particular "brand-name" software can become difficult. If you want a restricted "extranet/portal" system for a limited set of members it's a great system, particularly if you add a Domino CRM on top. Unlike Microsoft, you never have to resort to command-line tools, like PowerShell, in Domino to get things done.
Minimal coding experience required. Javascript is a must-have, but the documentation is excellent, and once you're past the learning curve, it's great!
Great WYSIWYG editor. It's easy to see the layout and still have deep control over what you're putting together.
Excellent integrations with G Suite. There are methods built-in that allow you to easily authenticate and work with the G Suite APIs.
Definitely not for beginners. App Maker certainly isn't usable by "everybody," but it's excellent for those who are willing to learn and get their hands dirty!
Experienced developers will have issues. The target user is someone who doesn't want to (or know how to) use something like App Engine or Kubernetes. People with more experience will certainly see limitations and find it difficult to use to the fullest extent.
Data sources can be iffy to manage. It used to be that App Maker would use a sheet or "Drive table" as a data source, but it now requires a GCP data source like CloudSQL.
App Maker is a very "do it yourself" platform. There is a huge amount of documentation and plenty of examples to begin learning, plus a vast community support through StackOverflow that can assist anywhere that you're stuck, but the great thing is that it's all up to you. If there are specific features that don't work, Google is always there to help troubleshoot.
App Maker is really kind of new in its own space. We haven't seen the level of functionality, nor the deep integrations, with anything else. It can replace a lot of products, and we've seen it in place in many applications across our organization, so it's been able to reduce our spend on products that offer specific functionality and still need to be customized.
We use SharePoint, SQL and Teams but only for the things that they excel in. For example, we use teams for small team interactions (including external participants). We use teams for meetings too. We've discovered that Teams collaboration is not as full-functional as Domino and more importantly, that our members (financial services) do not trust the Open Office365 cloud. SharePoint and Team collaborative features are often blocked in our member organizations. Domino is much easier to identify and unblock at the firewall level. It's much easier to restrict collaboration to approved options in Domino.
We have seen a reduction in time spent on manual processes by being able to automate functions in Google Sheets, take input with special functionality, and have App Maker do the work for us.
We have seen the internal development queue decrease, which allows us to focus on larger projects that couldn't be handled by App Maker.
We have seen ownership and process improvements increase in certain departments, as they are able to get to work themselves.
The immediate impact on my organization as a non-profit is cost. Enterprise pricing for a Domino solution is exponentially more inexpensive than more popular applications.
Of the most obvious impacts is user familiarity. Given a vast majority of the employment pool having familiarity with MS products, orienting new employees to Domino\Notes is burdensome. Adoption is slow and resistance is high.
Hiring Domino administrators and developers is increasingly challenging.
The recent sale of the Domino platform away from IBM is concerning.
