Reflections on ProcessMaker 3 Community Edition End-of-life
My journey in process automation started about 15 years ago when I downloaded Community Edition following a request from my manager to find an alternative solution to the current system we were using. It’s been an amazing journey since then. I’ve had the privilege of helping businesses transform how they work, eliminating manual processes and replacing them with automated workflows, resulting in improved productivity and increased efficiency.
Software like Process Maker Community Edition continues to be a game changer for many organizations just starting the automation journey. Even though ProcessMaker has since moved on to focus on the larger enterprise segment of the market, introducing new and wonderful features like AI-generated workflows, using AI to create your forms, taking a picture of a process and automatically generating the process model, for a lot of small and even mid-sized businesses in countries with low income or developing countries, that kind of technology is usually out of reach.
For this category of businesses, I’ve found that the journey usually begins with someone in technology or operations trying to improve things. They go online searching for a solution that can help them automate their processes, and when they come across the ProcessMaker community edition, they install it. Then they build a proof of concept process and deploy it within their organization. Since there is usually no budget for this, they focus on demonstrating the value and driving adoption.
After a while, usually 1 to 2 years, they start running into the limitations of the community edition. Recently, I’ve had a couple of conversations with similar organizations where they have the Community Edition, and they’ve run into bottlenecks (slow queries, degraded performance and poor user experience). This is because the Community Edition is not designed for use at scale. At some point, these organizations are ready to invest to move from the community to the enterprise edition.
Sadly, ProcessMaker no longer invests as much in the Community Edition as it used to. The ProcessMaker 3 Community Edition has been pulled from Sourceforge. Although the new version of ProcessMaker has a Community Edition, its features are quite limited (all the good stuff is in the enterprise add-on packages). You’ll also need some good DevOps experience to get it setup correctly as the installation documentation is not as detailed as you had with ProcessMaker 3.
I think the journey where businesses start with the Community Edition of a solution, and then show value within the organization by building something and gaining user adoption remains valid. It provides a low-risk approach to adopting technologies, especially for organizations with limited budgets helping them avoid shiny objects that end up being a flop. As the business sees the value, the technology or IT team can make a business case and get a budget to upgrade to the Enterprise edition with more features and support.
I’ve seen this happen with several organizations, and maybe it’s because that’s how my journey began and I’ve witnessed first-hand the success and impact of the strategy multiple times, I am saddened to see this roadmap gradually fading away. However, I know there are many organizations all over the world that currently still use ProcessMaker Community Edition and are driving business value with it.
As this chapter in the ProcessMaker story comes to a close, I wonder how we find a solution that enables these kinds of organizations to continue to derive value from their current time and labour investments, so that they succeed and reach a point where they get enough user and business adoption, that then helps them make the business case to transition from community to enterprise edition.
Another thing I wonder about is how the investments going into the new platform will help existing customers overcome one of their biggest challenges. When these customers are ready to move to the enterprise edition, the biggest hurdle will be “How do they get all their existing processes and the associated data built in the Community Edition into the Enterprise version?”.
Presently, ProcessMaker offers the ProcessMaker platform “that seamlessly integrates our previous two releases”. This allows organizations to run their ProcessMaker 3 enterprise in the cloud along with ProcessMaker 4. The platform has its limitations though. You can’t create a new process in version 3 or add new features to the ProcessMaker 3 processes, but you can start using version 4 to build your new processes and gain access to the latest features. Users can switch between the classic ProcessMaker and the new ProcessMaker, however, this is a less-than-ideal experience.
For customers coming from the community edition, migration to the ProcessMaker platform is a huge lift. First, they would migrate to the ProcessMaker 3 Enterprise Edition version that matches their current community edition’s version. If that happens to be a lower version than 3.8, they would have to upgrade to version 3.8 before migrating to the ProcessMaker platform.
I think it will be great to see the advances that ProcessMaker have made in infusing the platform with AI capabilities extended to creating a feature that would enable ProcessMaker 3 processes to be converted to version 4 processes. I don’t expect it to be perfect, but that would help migrating customers significantly reduce the time it takes them to move their current processes to take advantage of the latest version’s features.
If you are using ProcessMaker Community Edition, what are your current challenges and what factors are limiting the adoption of ProcessMaker within your organization? What features would you like to see and which alternatives are you exploring in advancing your digital transformation agenda?
For those who are looking to adopt the playbook of starting with community and then moving on to enterprise, after gaining user adoption and showing business value, what options are you currently considering?
Anyway, this is just me rambling on and thinking out loud about what the future holds for customers currently running on ProcessMaker Community Edition and those for who this is no longer an option.
