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1. Creation of workflow in SharePoint is very complex and time-consuming...
The automation of a business process where a full-featured electronic form is routed from one person to the next following a predefined flow is not an easy job in MS SharePoint. And if you want the form to adapt to the different steps in the business process, or if you need to add rules and conditions to the workflow behaviour, it really turns into a configuration nightmare.
Some courageous ICT engineers or developers could argue that all of this can be programmed in MS SharePoint. Unfortunately they are right… somehow... but it is going to be a very long, tough and painful process. Get ready for a tsunami of source code lines. In some cases it would probably make more sense to start from scratch with a new .Net project instead of tweaking your SharePoint configuration.
We have seen them passing by throughout the last few years, the brave but unfortunate SharePoint project managers that never got to the “Hello World” of their workflow process. Sometimes even after a timespan of more than a year. A quick cost calculation of these lost hours would knock you over backward. And we didn't even dare to mention the cost related to the delay of the project.
But the good news is that there is an alternative. With the BizzMine zero-code platform, it is perfectly possible to automate a complex workflow process in not more than a few hours. Including a user-friendly form that adapts to every step in the business process. If required, you can add gateways with rules or conditions to the workflow process. And in the blink of an eye you can create beautiful dashboards that present your data in a visual way.
And the best is yet to come… you can do all of this without writing a single line of code! After a short training, IT-savvy process owners can create and maintain their own business processes. With BizzMine you have the choice between doing the implementation yourself or hiring a BizzMine consultant to get the job done for you. Or a combination of both.
Whatever option you choose, the BizzMine implementation will be quick and smooth, as in ‘hours’ or ‘days’ not 'months' or 'years' like with most Sharepoint projects.
2. Maintaining your Sharepoint customisation is not a walk in the park.
Extending or updating a Microsoft Sharepoint configuration is definitely not easy, and in the case of the project manager having left the company it even turns into a mission impossible. Other developers barely dare to touch the source code because they are too afraid to break it.
So, why not hire an external expert? Well, Sharepoint consultants can be quite expensive, especially when you take into account that they will hang around for some time. So budget constraints might easily block you from getting your workflow process being synced with the daily corporate reality. In the end it is not rare to see people working with outdated processes. Or even worse, to see processes being abandoned in the dungeons of the Sharepoint castle.
In BizzMine, adapting or re-engineering an existing workflow process is just as easy as creating a new one. And it can be done by your process owners, your IT staff or a BizzMine consultant. They will get the job done in a couple of hours or days.
3. MS Sharepoint eats a lot of ICT-resources and is labour-intensive to install and maintain.
To set up a Sharepoint environment you will need some serious (virtual) hardware resources. On top of that, keeping your servers up-to-date will consume a lot of time and energy. And lastly, it is known that installing updates or upgrading to a new Sharepoint release can easily break your customised deployment.
Within this context, it is important to highlight that the Sharepoint version that ships with your Office-365 subscription is an “as-is” variant. This means that it has to be used out-of-the-box, without any advanced tweaks. If you really need to start building complex workflow processes, you will need to code. Which leads you back to the Standard or Enterprise Edition of Sharepoint, running on your farm of (virtual) machines.
Conclusion: setting up and maintaining a Sharepoint infrastructure is expensive and time-consuming.
The better alternative: with BizzMine you can choose the On-Premises version, running on a single SQL Server and IIS Server. Or you can opt for the cloud version of BizzMine which frees you from installation and maintenance headaches.