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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ServiceNow Now Platform
Score 8.7 out of 10
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The ServiceNow Now Platform is a digital workflow building and extension tool for ServiceNow featuring a number of low-code / no code tools.
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.
ITSM is straight forward creation of Incidents and Requests. It can get more confusing as you layer more modules on top of it with event management, risk, project, etc. It also becomes more costly as everything is a different license. Integration between other external applications is very easy to do with their API. You can easily create endpoints for external apps to talk to or create REST messages for the platform to reach out directly.
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.
Providing admins/devs with easier mechanisms for providing businss stakeholders with self-service admin capabilities across the platform
Tutorials on how to be the best at reporting in servicenow
Guided tour functionaltiy is a bit rigid and could use more workflow capabilities
Making it easier to push form variables to the user so there is more context when providing an approval. The out of box approval UI/form is terrible in my opinion.
While we are very likely to renew, we are also assessing if we should renew all of what we currently subscribe to as we try to reduce costs. Some parts of the business feel there may be a better tool out there to fit their process requirements. We are currently working with them to identify what those requirements are to see if it makes sense while also pointing out a reduced cost of tooling is not always the best fit if we have an increased cost of customization and maintenance between tools.
It provides a lot of modification options which is wonderful for certain team usage but becomes too much of a job when it comes to the Service Desk. Also on the app support side, since too much information can be carried, it affects the GUI and makes it complex.
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.
The platform is provided as a SaaS solution and support from the vendor has been good. There are regular software releases with bug fixes, new features and enhancements, and furthermore we are given the opportunity to fully test these before rolling these new releases out into the production environment to minimise the risk of business disruption
We went through a re-implementation last year with a partner and were very pleased with the outcome. We looked at several partners and chose one that was able to provide an entire scope and cost upfront of what would be required to complete our requirements. We worked very closely with the dedicated team assigned to our project throughout the process and they fully delivered on all of our requirements that we presented in the initial scope.
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.
ServiceNow is by far a better tool over Remedy. Its ability to integrate so seamlessly to so many tools allows for plenty of opportunity to streamline and improve processes. Servicenow has intuitive flows that allow you to quickly pivot if process change. Its adaptiveness is what makes it far better solution over Remedy
Our base managed service MSA is very clear and focused on our use of ITSM (ITIL role license). Other parts of the platform use some sort of transaction count licensing. This type of pricing does not work for an implementation of our scale.
Very easy to use. Capture more data from the Incident and problem management. Easier to escalate and following the change management process to resole the issues.
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.
Ensuring good service support internally and externally has triggered opportunities to sustain good links with everyone and opened the door to more sales and successful business and ServiceNow has been key in all this, so the investment came back to us faster than expected.
