I am looking for some alternatives to MS Flow/Power-Automate to save money. How are these two solutions different? Advantages of each? Downsides?
https://elsa-workflows.github.io/elsa-core/
and
https://github.com/danielgerlag/workflow-core
We are primarily converting some older Lotus Notes apps to Sharepoint and other things and need to trigger workflows after a form is submitted. Somtimes 5 layer deep approvals, etc. I know Sharepoint and Workflow Foundation aren't really being actively developed anymore as well.
Related
Increasingly, I have noticed the number of Content Management Systems in use. I have some familiarity with SiteCore. I have read some literature on Umbraco. I only just got wind of Orchard the other day. I have only heard positive feedback about EPiServer. I am soon to move into a role that uses it.
Do these differ vastly in features and price? What has led you to choose one (or several) over the others?
EDIT
I did a brief review of so-called free CMSs here: On Free Microsoft Compatible Content Management Systems
Reasons I ditched Orchard when developing a 50k page website:
The Orchard CMS import tool is simply too slow. It would only accept
small batches at a time. Initially, it took eight minutes to import
1000 records. So, working on that principle I expected that it could
take seven hours to import all the records. Unfortunately, I started
to receive performance issues as more records were inserted into the
database. I even started to reduce the batch size, which helped only
temporarily in the early stages. (See Saying no to Orchard)
I can only comment mainly on Sitecore and a bit on Umbraco from my knowledge of others using it:
Sitecore is an enterprise level web CMS with an "enterprise price tag." It's very extensible, has a lot of developer/community support, and is very developer friendly. The structure of content is based on a tree of nodes with parent-children relationships. Sitecore is well known in the WCM community as a leader in content management and is rated very well by companies sch as Forrester Research, etc.
Based on my previous research and conversations with friends, Umbraco is very similar to Sitecore. It has a lower price compared to Sitecore but its not a complete rip off. Umbraco is also built on ASP.NET like Sitecore.
Here's a three-part series on Sitecore vs. Umbraco from a developer.
Of the ones you mention above, I have only used Umbraco and Sitecore to build with and am certified in both. I like the way they allow me to build systems that really work well for my customers. They both have a feel that they simply give you building blocks to create your masterpiece instead of "modules" of functionality plugged in that give you a blog, forum, etc. They make it really easy to share content throughout the site and create really nice admin experiences.
Umbraco's community is really great. They both struggle a little on the documentation side IMO, but Umbraco's videos really help and the community is quick to help. Also, if you're talking cost then its free (Umbraco) vs. quite expensive (Sitecore).
But the reality is that each developer has their own taste and the style of CMS they like to work with. Ultimately, its the team that has to build the site that really matters most when it comes to how each CMS performs for the end user.
In addition to the links above, here are a couple blog posts that may help you get a feel for the different systems:
Orchard & Umbraco - Introduction (part 1 of 4) - Aaron Powell
Sitecore vs. Umbraco Terminology
Good luck!
I mostly work with EPiServer and Sitecore, and I can tell you the difference in short:
Sitecore has broader architecture and more powerfull UI. CMS is deeply configurable and highly extensible, it has clever publishing and caching system, powerful search and page editor. But it doesn't provide much out of box and UI is pretty old, slow and hard to learn. So this will be a long journey until you understand it good and make a good support of all its features for editors.
EPiServer is easy, friendly to users and developers. It provides an essential bunch of features out of box, has easy UI and page editor, good drag-and-drop experience, easy personalization. It is code-first, distributed with NuGet, provides dependency injection for its services, out of box MVC support. But it's not so extensible and configurable, has pure search (without expensive EPiFind module) and generally lower-featured comparing to Sitecore. So it's good for small/middle websites, but can be an obstacle in complex solutions.
Both have similar tree-item concept, rich documentation, pure public module system and hard UI customization. Both expensive and not open source.
As I know, Umbraco is pretty similar to EPiServer and Sitecore, but free and open source. Of course you get less features, more bugs, not much docs and no free support.
Orchard is really different comparing to other three CMS. It is module-based like Wordpress: you use standard or public modules and themes, instead of writing the whole website from scratch. You create your own themes and modules to customize the website and CMS. So entire CMS is highly extensible and provides a lot of free community modules. But in the same time you lose control and learning curve is much longer. Orchard is free and open-source, entirely MVC-based, UI and API are well done, but it can be hard for both developers and editors to understand it.
Wordpress vs Episerver:
http://tedgustaf.com/blog/2011/2/comparison-of-episerver-and-wordpress/
OK so the guy who wrote that is an Episerver consultant but it's interesting and balanced.
All the different web content management systems have different strengths. So which one is best for you depends a lot on what kind of sites you create, what kind of budget you have and what you think matters the most in a CMS.
For example, Orchard and SiteCore are VERY different systems.
I'm a bit biased as I work there, but I believe that Webnodes CMS have several important advantages over the systems you mention.
Keywords: Relations between content, actual classes for the different content types, custom LINQ provider for all data access, expose all content as an OData endpoint etc.
Microsoft used our CMS to demonstrate OData at Mix11. Video from Mix 11
I have got one project where I need to build a site in Sitecore CMS.
I have never used that CMS.
I want to know that if my programming skills are good because I don't know ASP or ASP.net but do know PHP.
The sites are simple html pages with no logins and processing.
Can I do it few weeks?
I was a PHP person when my company switched to Sitecore, although we had an ASP.net developer.
99% of what is done in Sitecore is achieved without any .net programming requirement. A website consists of data templates, which are defined in the Sitecore desktop environment (much like Windows, but in a browser). Data templates define the fields that each type of page has, the workflow it is in and other content-centric things. Renders are then attached to the template - these are xslt files which take the data provided by the data template and format it into (x)html.
I'd recommend getting enrolled on the Sitecore Developer Training - this is a one day course which will get you fully set up and ready to start building.
http://www.sitecore.net/en/Training.aspx
Sitecore v6 is easier to build with than v5. There's also SDN (sdn.sitecore.net) which has a large amount of documentation and examples.
Also, as Sitecore is only available through Sitecore Partners, you should have access to a knowledgeable Sitecore Professional.
Seems like it's real easy.
http://www.sitecore.net/en/Products/Sitecore-CMS.aspx
Sitecore Makes it Effortless to Create Content and Experience Rich Websites
Sitecore helps you achieve your business goals such as increasing sales and search engine visibility, while being straightforward to integrate and administer. Sitecore lets you deliver sites that are highly scalable, robust and secure, and is built to simplify your life, automate your processes, and let you deliver results faster.
Seriously, this question can't be answered as is. Sitecore CMS can be used by business users with no dev experience and it can be used by developers to do more complicated things. How complicated it is to use Sitecore depends entirely on what exactly you're trying to do. It might be easy, it might be complicated, but without more details it's impossible to know.
I need to set up a CMS for our marketing dept. Basically they need a system that they can
sharing documents with multiple users
editing documents with multiple users
tracking changes
tracking/keeping multiple versions
storing and organizing files
The types of documents are : Illustrator, Photoshop, Pdf, MS word and Excel.
I am in the process of evaluating different CMS to use. Since we are a .Net shop so the first requirement is Windows based. I know we can use Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or DotNetNuke.
Could anyone give me some suggestion? Thanks a lot!
I don't think you're looking for a CMS so much as a DMS (Document Management System). CMS are usually used for managing web-based content as opposed to documents, or if they do document management they usually do a poor job at it.
For basic management of Illustrator, Photoshop, Pdf, MS word and Excel documents I would look to something along the lines of SharePoint - it will suit your needs well for the PDF / Office documents, though I'm not sure how well it does with Illustration / Photoshop files - I'm sure it will store them but you might not have the full advantage of indexing provided by Sharepoint.
SiteCore is a tad bit on the expensive side, but for what it does it's well worth the investment. I've had a demo of the application and was very impressed with what SiteCore offers for end users. The application is developed in .net so any asp.net developers will be able to add, adjust and modify different items for you.
You've spoke about digital assest management, well here is Razuna, it's an open source digital assest management system that has several kinds of downloads to play with, one even being a pre-setup Virtual Image which can get you started right away. Take a look at it and see what you think.
Good luck on your search, and hope this helped some.
I'd consider Google Docs to begin with.
Otherwise, SharePoint can handle the office documents fairly well. If it's just for the marketing team, the 'free' Windows Sharepoint Services should suffice.
You may then want to look into Adobe Version Cue to handle the Adobe based art files.
An alternative thought would be to consider Version Control, so for example Subversion could work for storing changes, keeping track of changes, etc.
Percussion CMS is a GREAT marketing tool, someone recommended Document Management System for your applications you want to integrate and use with your CMS however; the key word is marketing tool. Percussion CMS is a great investment tool to help establish your online presence! With solutions like community marketing, personalization and web analytics these solutions are geared to generate a response from site users. Community marketing helps to engage socially with your visitors in facebook, twitter and community forums. Personalization helps with brand identity, features including product promotion and help your site's represent your company the way you want to be perceived. Lastly web analytics track users and report data back to marketers including information on bounce rates and geo-tracking. Reports showing whose visiting your site and their behaviors. Most importantly the Web CMS is fool proof. It is not code based or needs a webmaster to publish the content for your website. It's extremely user friendly.
I was trying to analyze the trend about companies leaving their own custom built solution in favor of the standard CMS solutions such as Drupal, Joomla and DotNetNuke etc. While I can find many stories about medium and large organizations leaving their custom solution for Drupal/Joomla etc, I cannot find any reference where organizations are leaving prebuilt CMS's/Frameworks to go custom again. Is this not happening at all or it's just a matter of not being properly documented?
Thank you.
Imran.
I can't think of a situation where a company has abandoned an in-house developed CMS in favor of re-developing a CMS on their own.
Everything I'm familiar with involves leaving a hand rolled CMS solution in favor of a commercial/open source solution.
Well i can imagine that while most companies prefer homebrewn solutions for some of them or in certain scenario's an open source or commercial alternative might fill their needs.
In case we at our work need to set up a blog we'll most likely choose wordpress, we know it, it does what it needs to do and does it good. Customization isn't a big deal but out of the box it works too.
For larger projects we always use our own CSM built with our own framework, that is what we know best.
So to answer your question, I still have to see the first company going from existing CMS to custom built but i'm fairly certain there are alot doing both.
Looking at it just from an engineering standpoint -- a commercial CMS company, with 50 full time engineers, puts in about 100k hours of engineering effort annually into managing and developing products. A homegrown solution typically has a small team of engineers assigned to manage and develop it, often also balancing other projects & responsibilities. Let's say the homegrown solution has a team of 4 people, working part time (20 hours) a week, which is about 4k hours annually into managing and developing the product.
That's 100k vs 4k hours of engineering in 1 year.
Also consider, for the homegrown solution, most of the first year's 4k hours will be spent recreating basic content management that has been written 100 times over, e.g. permissioning, workflow, approval processes, etc.
From a business standpoint, businesses want to focus on their core competencies. Unless your core competency is content management, makes no sense to build a homegrown CMS from scratch, and companies largely are not doing this, or moving away from them if they have in the past.
There is a pretty strong need for us to design some workflows around various processes. The problem is none of us actually know any workflow technology yet, and finding good data to compare the available options has been tedious and not entirely fruitful.
So I figured I'd ask you guys.
The main technologies we are looking at are Windows Workflow Foundation and eDocs Workflow. What other options are there? Sharepoint 2007 has workflow functionality too, right? Is that just based on WF?
What are the pros and cons of the various technologies? How do they compare?
EDIT: Also, one feature the administrative types like with eDocs Workflow is that it provides a method for them to edit it themselves. I believe Sharepoint '07 does as well. Is there some other way to allow that with a straight WWF implementation?
Sharepoint and WF more like complementary technologies, designed as two different workflow authoring tools in the same ecosystem. There's a Sharepoint workflow designer, and a WF (Windows Workflow Foundation) workflow designer.
The Sharepoint designer is meant to be an Office-like workflow editing experience, easier to get started with, geared for non-technical types, and generates all the web forms automatically.
The 'WF' workflow designer on the other hand is actually a component of Visual Studio (by default - as Bernie says you can rehost it), and designed to allow programmers to be able to fully customize workflow, and integrate it with any other code/systems desired. Building and deploying sharepoint sites this way is still possible, through the use of 'Sharepoint Activities', but more complex.
If you take the former route, you can hopefully let the administrative types do their own basic customizations (up to the limits of that environment) without causing total chaos.
It is possible to 'rehost' the WF designer (the one from Visual Studio) in your own application, so that users can author workflows. There are a number of code examples on the web, the most important one from MS itself: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480213.aspx).
At some point, when evaluating WF, I implemented a demo application that did this and added some features and found that although it works, not everybody can understand and use the more difficult activities (like the policy activity) that require understanding of how the rules engine works.