Kofax TotalAgility brings cognitive capture capabilities to the hands of business analysts and non-technical users to solve content-centric challenges, including classification and extraction from financial documents, contracts, forms and other information-intensive documents. With it, the vendor says organizations can accelerate information intensive workflows by applying cognitive capture and artificial intelligence to unstructured data in order to automate and extract information and unlock…
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OutSystems
Score 9.0 out of 10
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The OutSystems Platform is a Platform-as-a-Service solution for rapid delivery of responsive web and mobile applications. It includes functionalities required to develop, deploy, manage and change web and mobile applications. It is targeted at the delivery of enterprise applications that require integration with backend systems, complex business rules and logic, usable interfaces and flexibility to change. It can be deployed in the cloud, on-premises or in hybrid environments.
The platform is an excellent solution for companies looking for a workflow automation system that can be used across departments and its return on investment becomes apparent once it is introduced in production for a business. Its ability to route work tasks dynamically between employees and outside parties, implement SLAs, and get information to a back-end source is excellent.
Well suited for internal exposure of business processes (invoicing, API layer to other systems, customer maintenance etc), whether a UI is required or not. Not so well suited for full fledged web design. An OutSystems application must serve one particular business need, if gets too much functionalities and responsibilities it tends to get chaotic and complex.
Ease of use. The drag and drop configuration to create the processes makes the product easy to use and configure. Most of the icons are intuitive on what they are and how to use them. The use of the colored icons for each value also helps to know that that value is looking for.
Forms. The capture forms are easy to create and maintain. A new field can be added to the Extraction group and then the capture form is regenerated and that field is automatically added to the form with all the proper attributes. If an additional check box or field is added to the form, that field stays when regenerated. This differs from KTA 6.0.
Kofax has done pretty well integrating all the pieces of Kofax into one product. KC (Kofax Capture), KIC (Kofax Import Connector), KTM (Kofax Transformation Module with OCR), and workflow are all combined into KTA (Kofax Total Agility). This lets all of these features work together in one product. Kofax does keep adding more to the functions that maybe were left out original version. This makes Kofax Total Agility a robust product.
Exception management within the platform can certainly be improved upon. If a job is suspended for any particular issue integrations can be put in place to attempt to handle them but it is kludgy and does not always work as anticipated.
The administration interface is based on Microsoft Silverlight which limits it to certain versions of Internet Explorer and the interface has seen better days. Their other application, Kofax Kapow, has a much more mature and intuitive interface. This supposedly is being replaced in the next major iteration but I have doubts it will be successfully done.
The product is expensive. It is also the Cadillac of workflow platforms with document transformation built in. In many cases the product can do what you want it to do but there may be other more cost effective platforms.
Price – The licensing model of OutSystems is very expensive and not suitable for small scale developments. This is offset by the time to develop and stability for larger scale developments
Flexibility on PaaS version – The PaaS hosted version of OutSystems limits your flexibility to access the front end and backend database systems which can significantly restrict your options on high data volume developments or where anything requiring slightly out of the ordinary access is required
Same price for PaaS and self-hosted system. Licensing model dictates that you pay the same price even when you host the system on your own hardware which effectively means you pay more to manage the infrastructure yourself
We are very happy with OutSystems and our developers deliver good work. OutSystems lets us build new software on a regulare (2 weekly) basis, which is highly flexible and adjustable. Even without very much experience, our developers manage to build usefull software, which is working a lot better than our previous (legacy) software.
I am really happy using OutSystems in my work. It gives me the opportunity to create good working software without having had very much IT-experience before. It also made me more interested in the background of IT and learning different languages.
The tech support is very reachable. Usually by [email] from but also by phone if needed. We had some difficulties at the start with understanding "what our machine was doing" under high performance load. After some good sessions understanding our needs they delivered good solutions for our problems we had in the beginning.
The online training material is well designed and explanations are step by step, helping trainees to understand and follow each exercise and new concept.
In a large company, patiently and consistently work the behind the scenes politics with business and IT partners across the firm. This is transformational - you will need a solid set of key business partners to lock arms together to move forward.
Kofax TotalAgility is a beast of a package that gives you a thousand ways to tackle a problem, but it may not be the best platform for your needs. It is more of an enterprise platform that integrates well with other systems with moderate development time. Other packages may be cheaper, easier, and faster to implement depending on needs.
I tried to use WordPress with some success. Also looked at Joomla. But when I saw OutSystems I knew I had been wasting my time there. It takes you longer to get going with OutSystems - but even I as a novice realized immediately that Outsystems is simply in another league. Outsystems is powerful. (Can you compare WordPress and Joomla to Outsystems - I don't think so).
Kofax TotalAgility is very expensive. Some customers have reported that using the KTA workflow has increased productivity and has a good ROI overall. The customers have not shared true numbers for me to give details.
The ease of use of the OutSystems development process has been the biggest ROI for us. We have developed our Framework product and maintained/enhanced it with only 4 workers.
OutSystems has enhanced their product very significantly over the last 4 years. They have gone from a simple to use tool to a very simple to use sophisticated tool that covers the standard mainframe-based computing apps and the apps used on handheld mobile devices all using the same basic set of development tools.
