I work in a company that have a lot of Standard Operation Procedures that wich to automate. There are a lot of forms, complex workflow, and business rules. These forms should be accessible to company members through Intranet and the Internet.
We tried to find ready made software with no luck?
What is the best way to implement these forms? Should we use a ready made software? or implement our own -we have in-house developers with VB.Net and C# experience mainly building Win Forms applications- ? What companies usually use or do in this case?
Thank you very much.
There is not much information about the workflow to make a good judgement of that. However you say it is complex. Therefore I think something custom made would be best. Because you have many forms you want something with transactions as well I guess.
We use LiquidOffice which is a pretty full featured product. It is Java based but we have gotten it integrated into SharePoint just fine. We use it both internally and externally with very complex workflows and routing.
Other options include InfoPath and SharePoint itself. Trying to roll this out yourselves will probably cost way more with less desirable results than just going with a 3rd party product.
What's your budget and scale? Oracle, IBM, and SAP are the biggest vendors of that kind of software, but it's definitely not cheap. It will scale to pretty much any size though.
Related
my company is considering to use OpenOlat (LMS) in conjunction with a CMS.
The idea ist that our educaters will use OpenOlat as it is, while some functions (like displaying multiple choice tests) will be handled by a CMS. This way we try to keep things simple for our customers...
Problem is that I don´t know much about CMS (an programming in general) since I´am more like an expert on education... and also (aus usual) time ist pressing...
So my question is, if someone has tried this yet and if there are any suggestions which CMS to choose, especialy from a programmer´s perspective...
OpenOLAT has a fully embedded testing tool which also supports multiple choice tests and a question item pool to share question items with other authors or for building your own question pool. Assessment is not a typical scenario for a CMS, it is a use case for a LMS like OpenOLAT.
In OpenOLAT you can also configure two sites with permanent content. This is very often used as a simple intranet/extranet solution without the need for an additional CMS. If your emphasis is on elearning rather than static web site content you should consider this path.
This is clearly the most simple solution for your customers as they only have to get familiar with one single system.
Cheers
Florian
At this point we are developing Sitecore websites and we are gaining experience every day. This means that we know how to adjust our approach to different types of customers and that we are able to build our applications quicker every project we do. Of course Sitecore is not the only W-CMS around and we have looked into other W-CMS's.
What are the pro's and the con's for a company to offer solutions in different types of CMS's and what would this mean for the programmers that are working with this CMS?
Would a choice to offer solutions in more CMS's automatically mean that the global experience per CMS will shrink relative?
Hope there are some people around with experience in multiple big W-CMS's (Sitecore, KEntico, EPIServer, etc.. etc..).
If you truly enjoy working with Sitecore than maybe consider Umbraco. Umbraco is very similar to Sitecore and cheaper (I believe former Sitecore employees may even work there). It might be nice to offer a high-priced CMS (SC) and a less expensive alternative also built on .NET (Umbraco). I would say don't try to support tons of CMS's since there are so many. Keep a focus on a select few. Maybe consider selecting others based on the market for them and how their partner programs work (i.e. like Sitecore will recommend you as a solution partner and help you with sales).
Are you prepared to keep your programmers skills on top of each of the different CMS solutions you'd offer? That can be a high cost if you offer a number of different solutions based on different platforms,e.g. if you have programmers that have to know C#, Java and PHP because in this is what the various CMS support development be done. Thus, you may want to stick to .Net CMS rather than go venturing too far into a different stack as that can carry the challenge of maintaining skills.
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.
What is the most typical structure of business where you want to develop several web services? Should one establish a company for each of them or keep under one? I would like to hear your experiences maintaining such situation, keeping in mind the global focus.
By far the two most critical sets of issues determining the answer to this question are legal and financial (including, but not mainly, accounting). So it's hard to see how this question fits with the intent of this site.
It is advised to provide more background information on the topic. Business plans for SaaS companies can range from large cloud computing service vendors (with integrated solutions) and up to business analytics providers targeting specific market niche.
Business is a bit like programming: Keep It Simple (Stupid). Do not create multiple companies, unless there is a good reason to do it.
If You Planning to use python, you can use Django to build saas application,
this video Build SaaS application in Python django will explain about getting started with Sass.
Thanks
We need a good CMS that supports data clustering (managing and storing data on different servers). By "good" , I mean : reliable , minimum bugs , the faster the better. (Oh , and it should make coffee :) )
If you want everything and the kitchen sink plus clustering/scaling support, I'd say Plone. Very big community, written in Python, uses the Zope stack so it has a built in application server. Etc, etc. I suggest taking a look at it.
Yes … kitchen sink + community + support: Plone. Development heading very much in the right direction.
Plone is in some ways a different creature from many other systems. Depending on the environment, ultra-high performance may require some attention but in the community there's great expertise to steer any attention that may be required.
http://plone.org/support | Chat Room is a great venue for diverse and honest advice on this subject. We regularly steer people away from Plone -- when some other system will better suit their needs.
I agree, and I think that you need to look for software to fit your need. I have a few sites that only get minimal traffic that run on WordPress, but I also admin a site that runs Joomla and gets reliable amounts of traffic.
Also, Joomla has a wonderfully customizable interface with extensions, plugins, themes and a fairly easy to use administration tool.
I am not sure about "Performance-oriented" means for you. There are sites with Drupal and Joomla that receives million of visits month after month, and do not need special configurations like data clustering.
I think you must ask yourself if you need all you said.
For reliability, and no bugs or minimum bugs i can stand for Joomla.
I think the performance is a function of the hardware.
When you get to data clustering levels, your better off doing some real testing of CMS systems.
Most of the bigger names support a lot of things.
MS CMS Server, DotnetNuke
Anything used by really large shops should work.