Cloud Extend for Salesforce Battles It Out With Salesforce Visual Workflow
Everyone says their software is easy to use. And when it comes to anything related to “process” or “workflow,” everyone claims that a non-technical business user can use it. Certainly we claim it, and so does salesforce.com when they talk about their Visual Workflow product (actually some presenters from salesforce.com have admitted that the tool requires some programming prowess, but I suspect they were not following the company line).
So, when everyone claims some subjective characteristic like “ease of use” for their software, how can you tell who is telling the truth? I know what I would want: a side-by-side comparison. Walk me through what you have to do with each product in order to accomplish the same goal. And, of course, it has to be honest. You can’t show a side-by-side that claims that one product requires five steps to do something, when there is actually a way to do it in two steps if you know the software well. Unfortunately in this industry, people just don’t do side-by-side comparisons.
Today that changes — at least for these two technologies. Here is a side-by-side video comparison of Cloud Extend for Salesforce and salesforce.com’s Visual Workflow.
I have to commend my colleague Clive Bearman. He spent weeks learning Visual Workflow so that he could do an honest job of showing what you have to do in order to use it. There are all kinds of things that couldn’t be put into the side-by-side, like how hard it was for Clive to figure out what he had to do in Visual Workflow. I suppose he could have put together a video that talked about all the things he tried and all the places he looked before he figured out what he needed to do, but that would have been pretty boring to watch, and anyone could have claimed that they would have found it faster.
Luckily he has created the video so that you don’t have to watch the whole thing in order to get the point. He starts by showing how quickly and easily you can create a small process using Cloud Extend. He then shows the same process being developed using Visual Workflow, which takes much much longer — in fact, when he is only about half way through building the Visual Workflow equivalent, he gives up and skips to the end. Nonetheless, the Visual Workflow section is still longer (and more painful) than most viewers would be willing to sit through. But there is enough there that you can verify that nothing is being made up and no steps are missed. Those really are all the things you would need to do to get Visual Workflow to work.
So I hope you enjoy seeing a clear comparison between two technologies that make similar claims and (dare I say it) how easy it can be with Cloud Extend.
Post from: VOSibilities, the Active Endpoints BPMS blog
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Cloud Extend for Salesforce Battles It Out With Salesforce Visual Workflow
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