Red Hat JBoss SOA Platform drives business execution, responsiveness, and flexibility in an open platform. It delivers what the vendor describes as an easy-to-consume service-oriented architecture (SOA) integration suite that lets users build, deploy, integrate, and orchestrate applications and services.
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Kissflow
Score 6.4 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
KiSSFLOW is a cloud-based business process management and workflow management software designed to enable users to create an unlimited number of automated business applications with a through a simple user interface.
JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform is great when you are looking at building more or less pure Java applications and SOA micro-services that may integrate with multiple external data sources. It is less useful when you are looking to build simple SOA applications that are simple in nature since the overhead associated with deploying as well as learning BPEL.
Workflow. I would absolutely, 100% recommend it for a school, in Admissions, and I would recommend it to any small company who has an issue with workflow. The best thing about the program is that it knows what it is, and knows what it wants to be. You aren't going to sit down to work with KiSSFLOW and end up being sold an HR program. To make it work just right, find the person who truly understands how your business works. Have them build a workflow which takes care of the tedious tasks, and then let them train others on the process. You will find that your productivity increases, and that your paper costs decrease.
JBoss is open source so the cost overhead to deploy and build application is very low.
JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform and its parent Redhat are reputed and well adapted in the industry so it is easy to find best practices documentation for complex deployments of JBoss middleware.
Ease of Use: It's easier to use and see workflow tasks that are assigned to you, workflows that you've participated in, or workflows that are pending other peoples approvals. From a development side, it's easy to pick up and begin creating processes if you know Excel formulation, which is easily researched as well.
Ease of Access: Since KiSSFLOW is hosted in the cloud, you can access the site from any internet connected device. All you have to do is sign in with your account, as opposed to needing to be on the network to access like our previous system.
The App: This is a feature we really hope to get a lot of use out of. With the way our business is structured, there are a lot of Regional positions that are always on the go. Because our current system requires a user to be on the network to access, this makes it hard for these roles to respond to tasks, causing bottlenecks. With an app available, along with push notifications, we can keep these tasks responses on pace with the associates required in that task.
JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform is dependent and build for JEE/Java application so using a different programming paradigm will be much harder.
There is still a learning curve to get familiar with BPEL making it harder to get an SOA micro-service up and running compared to a fully cloud-based service
The reporting could use some improvement. The actual reports are OK, it is access to the reports that is the problem. This is related to the permission schema. It really just has user, admin, and nothing in-between. There really needs to be something like report admin or something. Excel exports for data are needed as well.
The user workflow selection UI is not the best. There is a big red + sign in the lower right of the browser window that is not labeled. That is not clear. Also the selection list is just a pop-up window, it really should be a full page.
The mobile app does not have all the features that the browser version has, especially admin tools.
Redhat support generally is great and that is true for the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform as well. Even if you do not buy support from Redhat, you can reply on the discussion board and bug fixes via the open-source JBoss without much trouble.
I haven't encountered a need for support with KiSSFLOW. It's not a perfect platform, but it's functional, dependable, and reasonably intuitive. I can't fault a support team just because their product works!
Oracle SOA Suite (Oracle BPM + Oracle BPEL + other components) and IBM WebSphere middleware is most costly and suited if you are already using applications and other middleware components from these vendors. Mulesoft (Salesforce Mule ESB) is best when you need deep integration with one of Salesforce's existing products. JBoss and Apache Web Server are best when you do not want to invest infant CapEx/OpEx on license fee. Apache Web Server based middleware is best for simple SOA applications.
KiSSFLOW is much easier to set up, less coding and easier to explain to those that are being trained. The company already had SharePoint, but it is a very difficult system to set up. A class had to be taken, along with getting books in order to understand the process of the workflow. With KiSSFLOW, it is simple to understand, the helpdesk is quick with their response, help topics are laid out simply and you can even talk with someone on that side to ask your questions. Overall, KiSSFLOW is a much easier workflow and system to use.
