With the death nail on InfoPath, there's a lot of talk on workflow and forms engines in SharePoint...We choose AgilePoint
Formotus is another option and they have a completely independent white paper that you can download from their web site. Of course, it'll be totally independent, given that it's from their web site. :)
The Good:- What’s really cool about the product
- 1. UI:
- User-friendly development.
- Easy to deploy and use.
- Neat Mobile friendly forms available
- A parallel process of two applications possible using subprocess using no code.
- SharePoint workflows in Agilepoint solve most purposes for which event receivers are needed.
- Wide variety of controls available for various functionalities.
- Different process models are available for different uses. I.e. E-forms, Sharepoint Forms, System Integration, etc.
- Can add Jquery/ CSS to controls easily through shared/ individual files.
- 2. Runtime:
- Detailed information about variables/fields used available at runtime.
- Multiple data sources can be used at various events.
- Running applications will continue to run when a new change is published, as a result of which the system doesn’t have to be brought down to deploy changes.
- Can use APIs to access any kind of data from other resources.
- 3. Product features:
- SharePoint version independent will work with future versions.
- Easy to be integrated into different systems because SharePoint, Salesforce has AgilePoint Dashboards available.
- Log in using various Authorization methods possible. (OAuth2 covers a lot of authorization methods)
- Very easy to export applications to other tenants and reuse them.
- Globally reusable tokens can be created and exported to multiple applications increasing reusability.
- Individual forms also can be exported and re-used across multiple applications and tenants.
- 4. On Premise /Private Cloud
- Multiple tenants possible on a private cloud
- Can access data stored in XML and create various reports based on the data
The Bad:
- UI:
- A canvas designed in a way that plain text cannot be placed on a form. It has to be in control.
- Controls take up a specific size that cannot be changed in height. This does give a neater look but the desired look is difficult (I may be biased as this is easily possible in MS word/ Infopath).
- Nesting controls is difficult except put in subforms which in turn do not support a lot of controls
- Custom HTML controls rendering is difficult.
- Autosave doesn’t happen and the UI becomes unresponsive at a time causing loss of data
- Runtime:
- Lookups take a while to load.
- Page submit actions can’t be modified.
- Poor integration with IE
- Offline modification of forms not possible
- Product Features:
- Look and feel can’t be modified to look like SharePoint to maintain consistency
- Difficult to integrate into SP if not using Agilepoint dashboards as a physical location of forms/tasks is not available
The Ugly:- What totally sucks
- UI:
- Very poor support for multiple controls in design time and runtime. Hence not suitable for larger forms.
- Runtime:
- Can't access forms from a physical location as forms are available as tasks. This is usually a major requirement by the client.
- Can't access data on the forms anywhere hence can’t be put in reports easily.