Kissflow vs. Oracle SOA Suite

We've used Kissflow [School Cloud] in order to track parent requests for transportation in the SpEd department. It has been user friendly for parents to input a request and staff to review, double check school sites and locations, and set up specific routes to meet the needs of students and communicate the info back to parents.

Incentivized

Oracle service bus is great to quickly proxy any legacy services exposed as soap service. It's well suited for aggregating multiple services on a single endpoint. We can point to multiple endpoints on the business service and use a round-robin approach to access the endpoints. It's not well suited for data transformation and quick preview of mappings and transformations. It's not great on path to cloud transformation.

Incentivized

• They know what they are. You aren't going to get a Workflow program that also wants to be a CRM. You will get the equivalent of an electronic assistant going from station to station, taking care of business and giving you the end result.
• Paper. It reduces the amount of paper needed for menial tasks tremendously. You can automate an entire process. As an educational institution, you may still need paper copies, but you aren't waiting for John Doe to sign Line 3, then Jane Doe to initial, and so on and so on with a paper form.
• Tracking. If you need to know where things are in the process, the fact that this program is dedicated to workflow makes it incredibly easy to identify where people are in the sales flow.
• Customer appreciation. When your workflow is stronger, faster, and better, the customers feel it. They feel like you are right there with them and getting things moving.

Incentivized

• The Oracle Service Bus makes the management of web services extremely easy. Through its point and click interface, the web service endpoints can be easily modified.
• The administration console provides useful dashboards to diagnose any service issues.

Incentivized

• Workflow Design: There isn't a copy/paste function when creating the workflow, and you can't move a workflow task between parallel branches. This becomes a pain point when an item has 98% of what you need, but you can't copy it and place it in another branch to make the last tweaks. Instead, it needs to be completely recreated
• Interface: While I like the current design features, which make it easy for an end-user to find their tasks and items, it would be nice to also have some flexibility within the platform. Things like being able to groups apps under a category or tailoring the look and feel of the page a little more would be a welcome addition.

Incentivized

• Message reporting tied to a database seems counter productive. Better options to eliminate that would not only minimize the maintenance hassle but also gives more ease to manage the product.
• Polling feature isn't very efficient where the end point JMS queues may still have JMS connections despite not enabling the corresponding poller proxy services.
• Unable to deploy multiple web services in one go from the OSB Web console.

Incentivized

Really love the product. Was pleasantly surprised that it has been easy to use for parents

Incentivized

We have had not many issues with Oracle Service Bus and it's very stable for our requirements. It's highly available and helps us implement Tier1 applications on it.

Incentivized

The system has room to grow as it's limited by not being able to edit POs after they've been approved. The system is great for registrations and syncing to other systems while including the attachments. The reporting from Kissflow is also easy to setup to link to other platforms such as Looker

Incentivized

It's an excellent enterprise service bus and has very stable features. We have been using it since 2008. We did hit into some issues. But, recreating the service helped fix many issues. Also, deployment to various environments was easy. Also, the plugin on Eclipse helps to build proxy and business services quick and easy.

Incentivized

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!

Incentivized

We had some issues with MQ connectivity through OSB and our experience was poor with the support team. They do respond. But, it felt like we are ignored and we had bad support. We had to escalate and things used to get dragged for weeks before we get more quality questions on how to pursue investigation.

Incentivized

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.

Oracle being the market leader and has a lot of compatibilities with sources like SOA projects, Oracle database and other JMS feeds.

Incentivized

• The only real hard number savings that we have had with KiSSFLOW is the money we have saved in forms being printed, especially multi-part forms. So for a small college like us that it probably in the $5000 to $10000 per year range. We have certainly saved money in increased efficiencies of the processes that we have moved to KiSSFLOW. But that is harder to calculate.

• Improve customer relations/service
• Create internal/operational efficiencies
• Improve business process outcomes
• Improve compliance & risk management
• Strong services expertise
• Pre-existing relationships
• Strong consulting partnership
• Product functionality and performance

Incentivized