Mendix excels in scenarios involving Business Process Automation, making it a strong choice for applications requiring workflow automation, including processes like request approvals, document management, and other business workflows.Conversely, Mendix may be less suitable for projects that demand highly customized solutions with extensive custom coding. Its primary focus on low-code development may not align well with the requirements of projects that heavily rely on intricate and specialized coding.
SharePoint does not provide, out of the box, a tool to create / update workflows from web. You have to use SharePoint Designer in order to create them. If you need to implement custom workflows for specific business processes, then SharePoint Designer is well suited. SharePoint Designer allows you to create workflows with task approval, email notifications, assign variables and update SharePoint Lists / Documents properties. In our company, we have created specific workflows for : - Purchase order - RH forms validation like annual employee review - Dematerialized existing forms and validation
We're able to really easily develop different views that are very specific to a customer's needs or customer's different types of user needs. So for example, the production managers can have a certain view that's relevant to them and then certain line managers can have views that are specific to them that allow them to run different scenarios which they define. So it allows us to easily build customized apps for each different type of user.
2013 Workflows - Loops: You can build loops to work while a value (not) equals something, or N number of times. You can insert Parallel Blocks to do multiple things at once, or to watch for multiple things, and when 1 thing finishes, cancels the others and moves to the next step or stage.
2013 Workflows - Stages: Previously all we had were steps, which worked sequentially. With the Concept of Stages, we can create blocks of steps and based on the data collected during those functions, we can tell the workflow to go to a different Stage in the workflow based on a set of 1, or multiple, Conditionals in a transition area after each Stage. Giving you the power to develop multiple entire processes and skipping to the correct part of the workflow, rather than going through 20 conditionals to find out you needed to do action 31.
2013 Workflows - REST API: the "Call HTTP Web Service" is a very powerful tool, but hard to understand if you have never seen it done, or have a guideline. It works very similar to the requirements in PowerShell to connect and get and post data to SharePoint using the Rest API. You can also use this to manage permissions on List Items, Lists, Sites, and Site Collections. Best part is when developed correctly, it is SUPER FAST!
Intentionally Building Infinite Loops: I have built multiple review process from Managing Certifications to Updating Published Documentation, that monitors when an Item, based on provided approved metadata, when the "Author" needs to review the document within the given amount of time. They will get e-mails with links asking if changes are needed. If not, it is routed to the Approving Executive, and the Workflow Automatically updates the Metadata to push out the review dates to the next date, based on metadata provided on how how often the document should be reviews. By using conditionals in the transition of stages, it basically starts over, and goes into a parallel block to allow the monitoring of multiple values of metadata to move to the next stage. Very Powerful when you want to automate these types of process. It truly is a "Set It and Forget It" process.
In the newest version of SharePoint Designer, they have gotten rid of the Design view which makes what used to be quick and easy changes much more code-intensive. This makes it harder for non-IT users and is more risker for all SharePoint Designer users.
SharePoint Designer workflows have a lot of functionality, but there are also some crucial limitations, such as not being able to put lookup fields in email subjects or using parenthesis to separate/group logical conditions.
Although this goes along with the Design view, there really isn't a good user interface anymore for adding conditional formatting and styles in views/pages.
A 10 would say I have nothing to wish for. A 9 means I haven't seen anything better.This tool really helps you in the whole creation and maintenace cycle, so from requirements to building/modeling to testing to deploying to capturing feedback.
Response times are quick and you will get updates regularly about the status of your request. Even with very technical questions they have specialists that can help you with your problems it will give you an answer or help you with a work around.
Support is good from Microsoft. They are quite responsive when we raise a ticket but SP Designer support will be ended by Microsoft in the near future as they have got new techs like PowerApps and Flow to achieve the same functionality SP Designer does and even more than that.
Mendix would be my preferred system all the way. The system is designed for these kinds of works. I've worked with WP and DNN but they should be used just for websites. To create an app for a business value, I would suggest Mendix. Also, the offline capabilities of Mendix have greatly improved since the deployment of Mendix 7.13.
I haven't used anything else like this. I use different products for workflows and forms, but they aren't listed in the listings for this page. Instead of using it for workflows or forms (deprecated 2 years ago), I use Nintex. For everything else, I have what I need in the Modern version of SharePoint online
It helps to speed up application development because of its low code by the fact that it's low code. It allows professional developers to focus more on specialized application development rather than the more routine application development that business IT and super users can do for themselves with some coaching from the IT department. So it's just allowing the more specialist professional developers.net, for example, Java in our organization to focus on more complex engineering application developments.
For my needs, I have not found SharePoint Designer useful for my day to day maintenance of SharePoint. It is useful for viewing all the objects that make up the SharePoint site.
It is not as intuitive in regard to setting up Workflows. I have yet to use it to set up workflows in SharePoint. Maybe if I needed more complex workflows, it would be beneficial.
I like to use SharePoint Designer for moving around files within SharePoint sites.
