Infowise Actions vs SharePoint workflows

In my previous post I have explained about how Infowise forms are good alternatives to InfoPath and also we saw the price for Infowise forms for SharePoint online as well as SharePoint on premise versions. Before proceeding further, let us discuss and understand what are actions and workflows, the impact of actions or workflows in business processes in any organizations. In this post we will discuss about few advantages of actions and in another post we will see some examples of how easily we can achieve business process.

What are actions or workflows and why it is important for any business process?

SharePoint is not about just storing information in list or storing documents in document library. In an enterprise, every day lots of repetitive tasks, steps and process happens, in SharePoint we can save lots of time and money by automating and simplifying these complex processes. To name a few, in business processes: HR System, IT help desk system, Health care application processing, Job Application processing etc. To achieve these things we can create workflows and /or we can use Actions provided by Infowise ultimate forms.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Workflows

Requires Development Knowledge:

Workflows are great for developing complex business solutions. You can use SharePoint designer or visual studio to develop a workflow which definitely requires developer knowledge. Even if you use Nintex or K2 workflow products which are great workflow development tool, but those also requires development knowledge and licensing costs.

Nothing can be done before Item Creation:

In case of workflow nothing can be done before item submission. A workflow can be started after an item created or modified or even manually can be started after the item was created. You can also develop event receivers and attach to the list or library but that also requires lots of time, effort and development knowledge.

On the other side, what if business required doing something before item submission or business required some logic to be implemented on document checked in or document checked out.

Limited Actions

In case of SharePoint designer, the actions are limited, if you want to use more actions, you have to develop using visual studio which will require huge time as well as knowledge. On the other side you can use 3rd party products like Nintex or K2 which provides lots of actions.

Advantages of using Infowise Actions:

There are lot of advantages of using Infowise actions in SharePoint list or document library.

• One of important advantages of using is that there is not coding involved in it, everything you can do using browser itself, from the list settings page. Click on “Infowise Ultimate Forms” app in the Site contents page and then choose the list, you are done to define actions for the particular list without using any code.

• There are lots of actions type like Update list item, Create list item, Delete list item, Copy item/document, Send e-mail, Run workflow, create list, create site, Manager permission, Run DB stored procedure, Call web service, Manager Active Directory, Print list items, Calculate summery, Generate associated task etc. See fig below on various action types.

• A part from new item created, new item update, on item delete, on attachment added, attachment deleted and on timer based we can trigger the action. Timer-based action triggering is very impressive and very useful, you can see the options we can schedule.

All these things we can do by simply configuring in the browser without using any code.

• By using single check box, you can prevent saving the item if any action fails.
• If any action fails then you can directly send emails to users, so that users will get notified.
• Easily you can add conditions to trigger the action.

Conclusion:

All things we are able to achieve without using any workflow development tool or any other extra licensing cost. These feature includes inside the Infowise ultimate forms license. In the next post we will discuss about how we can use various Infowise ultimate form actions inside SharePoint list.