Microsoft's SharePoint Designer was a tool for developing SharePoint applications that has been discontinued.
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Progress Telerik
Score 8.4 out of 10
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With Telerik UI libraries, Progress aims to equip .NET ninjas with a full arsenal of weapons, helping to create beautiful, modern and future-proof applications quickly and intuitively. The vendor states that with its over 1,250 UI components for all .NET platforms, as well as various themes, skins and customization options, Telerik users report cutting development time by up to 50 percent. Web
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 have used the Telerik UI controls for our Admin user experience. We found that this lead to consistent user experience, with feature rich functions already provided. Effectively this meant that hour for hour, using the Telerik UI improved productivity in creating screens with more functions than using the default controls in ASP.NET. At this point most of our focus with the Telerik controls is User Interface oriented.
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.
The Telerik UI has become part of our staple development tools. We can not be as productive without the feature set available to us in the Telerik UI ASP.NET AJAX control package.
Progress Telerik UI is very usable and one of the best tools to use by the front-end development engineers in our team. It has helped us to improve the overall design of our existing and new applications. Also, the time to build applications has also been reduced effectively and we are able to focus on other areas of improvement to deliver a better user experience for our customers.
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.
Telerik UI support is what you are paying for. If something does not work you ask them for an example of how to solve your use case. The SEO on their sites is awesome and so well bedded into Google. The videos are good, [they're] not used much but their examples and DoJo examples make all the difference.
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
Progress Telerik UI provides a large amount of language support, demos, and documentation. While the competition is still great in their own right, Progress Telerik UI has provided enough resources to cover a number of current and future projects without having to expand to other libraries.
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.
