I am currently investigating possible tools with which to develop a workflow solution for a company that would be used by the staff to process incoming work and ensure incoming work is routed to the correct people for evaluation and are authorised by the relevant managers before work commences, and that the work is signed off when complete.
Is Microsoft Power Automate the right tool for this kind of work, or is it [simply] a tool for automating ones own personal tasks? I'm looking for something that could be used to develop a tool that would be used by everyone in the company.
I've looked at the various videos but it looks like it might be just something for automating ones personal tasks rather than building something to be shared. Is this correct or can it be used as a software development tool for developing a custom solution for a company?
Look at Business Process Flows (BPFs).
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/business-process-flows-overview
The following text is from "Why use business process flows?" on the above link:
Business process flows provide a guide for people to get work done.
They provide a streamlined user experience that leads people through
the processes their organization has defined for interactions that
need to be advanced to a conclusion of some kind. This user experience
can be tailored so that people with different security roles can have
an experience that best suits the work they do.
Use business process flows to define a set of steps for people to
follow to take them to a desired outcome. These steps provide a visual
indicator that tells people where they are in the business process.
Business process flows reduce the need for training because new users
don’t have to focus on which table they should be using. They can let
the process guide them. You can configure business process flows to
support common sales methodologies that can help your sales groups
achieve better results. For service groups, business process flows can
help new staff get up-to-speed more quickly and avoid mistakes that
could result in unsatisfied customers.
You can create broad, or detailed, BPFs, to cover company wide business processes. You can also call on separate normal flows, validations, and more. There are a lot of ways you can use a BPF to move things forward in a company.
Power Automate (aka MS Flow) is a low code/no code business workflow management or process orchestration software, getting more power with Robotic Process Automation & Virtual Agents inclusion.
The concept is having variety of connectors for all the available SaaS solutions (name anything like Dynamics, Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, Twitter, Facebook, Exchange mailbox, OneDrive, SharePoint, etc) to act as both Trigger and Action to achieve what we want. At worst case we can use REST APIs to complete the project setup.
Community demo the usefulness of it by showcasing the automation of personal stuffs but it has more. MS Flow is the alternate for Dynamics CRM 365 workflow and SharePoint workflow as well. Definitely it’s an enterprise candidate to solve company wide problems like onboarding, approvals, and many other workflow solutions.
Personally I would look at Azure Logic Apps for that level. It has just about the same connectors as MS Flow , but with the addition of better management, troubleshooting and extensibility capabilities and you get all the benefits of security in Azure and compliance good stuff that companies would need
Related
I have been learning to use flows in Power Automate and noticed that my flows are different from most videos I have tried to follow. For example, I have under my flows option: Cloud flows, Desktop Flows, Business process flows and shared with me, whereas videos I have been watching have their options as cloud and business (same as I have) and Team flows and UI flows which I do not have. Would I be correct in thinking that the flows have just been renamed, and if so would someone be able to point out which ones changed to which?
Many thanks.
I have tried to scour the net with no luck in finding out anything about a rename.
Regards
Ross
As you have mentioned the terminologies regarding the flow names have changed. I have been trying to search the net for a proper document about the name changes but couldn't find any. To answer your question:
Team flows are now shared with me & UI flows are desktop flows
Hope I have answered your question
Regards,
RT
I am new in Service Now platform, developing a custom app using the service portal and I am looking for some architectural advice from experts.
My storyline is my service is gonna serve different companies as per their requirements by easy codebase maintenance. for example, I am having a base app which has some concrete requirements that fit for all companies, but there will be some other features for company specific, like feature A for company A, feature B for company B and so on. So my initial plan was like classic software development that is to have a single codebase using git that will have multiple feature branches that will deploy to multiple instances. But sometimes some situation where I might need to merge the branches that is not possible now. My question here is there any alternative way to do that? Other possible scenarios here is should I go with a single instance with ACL based data separation? (but that not feels scalable to me cause the amount of the data will be huge after some time) or is that possible to apply regular SAAS architecture like multitenancy(single app with multiple databases) with some configuration wise feature separation?
Thanks in Advance.
This might be a basic query but I wanted to confirm if there is any way of using the LUIS services/functionality offline without consuming the online APIs and generating the public key online. By offline, I mean to say if there are any supporting libraries/DLLs available for on-premise solutions by which we can build the Intends/Utterences/Entities and train the NLP system offline.
(The reason for asking this question is that I want to integrate LUIS with my existing Microsoft Bot application. However, our organization limits the software usage to utilize only on-premise offline software and any online software/services/APIs such as Azure APIs are restricted.)
Assuming that there is no such offline support for LUIS AI, are there any other libraries that would provide such support for .NET apps. I have come across Apache OpenNLP but that seems to more of Java-oriented offering.
Any inputs/suggestions on this would be appreciated.
Luis now has the ability to be fully off-cloud and on-premise through a docker container pull. This would be available for on-premise and Azure's IoT Edge (intelligent Edge) products.
Keep in mind
The described solution still requires a connection for Azure LUIS billing purposes that at the time of this writing is at a 15 minute interval. I believe this will be adjusted at some point in the future but it is something to keep in mind and plan for.
Link to Container Support in Azure Cognitive Services
As well, specifically, LUIS has full integration via this scenario. Where you can install and run LUIS docker containers. Please, keep in mind at the time of this writing this is ONLY for LUIS. Not QNA, not Bing Spell Check, *not analytics from the LUIS endpoints but there is a container work around for that.
Also, not speech priming or sentiment analysis and a few other features listed in the article.
Lastly, you can look into "Azure Stack" and IoT Edge here
It's a promising start. There are work arounds you may have to engineer while these services bare out more fruit but keep asking questions and keep raising concerns and more features will surely come!
LUIS is based on an online use, like almost all Microsoft Cognitive Services (except Custom vision compact models for example). There is no possibility for offline use, even if it may be useful for some cases like mobile use also.
Moreover (see here in the official documentation):
Is LUIS available on-premises or in private cloud? => No
For your 2nd question, StackOverflow may not be the right place for this (see https://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic) and... I don't have a good solution! But would be interested to know one
As per Wikipedia:
SnapLogic is a commercial software company that provides Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) tools for connecting Cloud data sources, SaaS applications and on-premises business software applications.
It is surely a competitor to informatica, but it doesn't seem to be just another ETL tool. I have a rough understanding that it is used for data integration but that's about it.
Is it merely an ETL tool or does it have any other functionality? Also, what are iPaaS tools in general?
Well, the best place to learn about SnapLogic will be their website, https://www.snaplogic.com/
Here is a video of SnapLogic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYJK7bjOlA0
A simple developer friendly example:
Let's say i want to search for twitter feeds posted with a particular hashtag by a particular person and write that data into a database of my choice or into amazon S3. SnapLogic allows me to do that without learning about the Twitter API and AWS. SnapLogic takes care of the abstraction for the user so that they can focus on the business logic of things.
The demos are available in the blog: http://www.snaplogic.com/blog
A look at SnapLogic on crunchbase is not a bad idea and you could also find their competitors there.
Your other questions like what are integration platform as a service(iPaaS) tools is too basic and should just be googled.
Basically there are two types of cloud integration, iPaaS and dPaaS
Basically SnapLogic is a iPaas Tool (Integration Platforma as a Service), One of the growing online cloud based integration ETL tool.
As per the Gartner report one of leader in "Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service" refer below link
https://www.snaplogic.com/press-releases/gartner-names-snaplogic-as-a-leader-in-the-magic-quadrant
About tool and few useful links,
1.Designer
It's a canvas area to play and develop your integration pipelines.
2.Manager
Is is a main important to manage all the projects , pipelines, assets ,accounts,creating users and providing permissions, and also import and export of
projects.
3.Dashboard
Monitoring the pipelines logs and information of running pipelines and history.
Useful links:
1.Main site:
https://www.snaplogic.com
2.SnapLogic free trial:
https://www.snaplogic.com/free-trial
3.SnapLogic Documentation
http://doc.snaplogic.com/
4.SnapLogic Community
https://community.snaplogic.com/
5.SnapLogic Blog
https://www.snaplogic.com/blog
Also recently they released SnapLogic Extremem, Please have a look
https://www.snaplogic.com/press-releases/introducing-snaplogic-extreme-to-help-data-engineers-operationalize-cloud-based-big-data-integrations
The company where I work for (1800+ Employees) is looking to enhance the personal relationships between its employees, allow a better collaboration and communication between departments and make it easier for the HR department to identify skills, experience and interests among the personnel (ex: we have some colleagues with deep knowledge of SAP modules and products, but during concrete projects it results very difficult to identify them and integrate them). Therefore, they want to implement a social network for our intranet.
We are just looking for the basic features such as profiles, discussion boards and so on, so nothing fancy. I proposed Community Server but my boss said .Net and java are no-gos. He wants LAMP and is not interested in a web solution like Ning, because of privacy and security concerns. It does not matter if it is Open-Source or commercial software. But it should allow a complete layout customization and must also have access from the outside world.
So my question would be, is there something like Community Server running on a LAMP stack?
Thank you very much!
UPDATE: We already have a Facebook page and a group. But my boss wants some features not included in Facebook such as a tag cloud in each profile page displaying skills and relevant proyects; and a feature like the "neighborhoods" from Last.FM, where you can group people with similar skills and interests and there is also the confidentialy issue (discussions about projects, clients, etc). So, any ideas?
You should check out StatusNet. http://status.net/
It doesn't directly answer your question, but aren't you rather trying to reinvent the wheel?
Facebook has got Social Networking down and the likely hood is 95% of your 1800 employees already use it.
Why would you go to the effort of writing and supporting a product as well as asking your employees to update information about themselves in multiple places when you could just set up a Facebook Network.
The other point I would make is, why are you limiting yourself to one way of doing things right from the off. Perhaps a detailed analysis of which technologies best serve your purpose would be more appropriate.
I appreciate this doesn't answer you question, I just feel this is a good example of Corporations unwilling to embrace tools already out there, I suspect because they are scared of them.
I'm probably right in guess that you're company heavily monitors Facebook usage, which is why this also might be hard.
Try Open Atrium, a Drupal-based team server.
Some sort of facebook application would allow you to keep the data on a server that you manage, but still use facebook's existing features. Pretty certain that facebook uses PHP for its application framework.
I agree with MrEdmundo and would upvote him if I were registered. Dont fall victim to "It wasnt invented here" syndrome. I bet your boss is like "we need something like facebook".
If it makes you feel better... here is a little story:
I was trying to implement some sort of group chat so fellow employees could ask quick questions to eachother online without having to get up or if someone was on the phone, etc. However, the service I installed (some sort of jabber daemon, i forget which one) never really got used. The solution? Just install the facebook chat client because all the co-workers are already on facebook most the day anyways!
plus, the "screen name" is appropriate because it is our real names, not stuff like "Out Into Space", "theman", or "fly-mystikal-dj-69"
You might want to consider something like Drupal. It's technically a CMS, but it's extremely customizable, and there are a lot of modules available that provide social-networking-style features.
Use Office Messenger for communication. It's basically like MSN Messenger but run on the company's servers so they can monitor all traffic. To know who has expertise in what area, it can't be too hard to build your own simple CRUD application to record profiles of employees and have each profile tagged with key skills, that the employee has and build a search function to find the people with the skills you need at any given time.
You can create an application using the Facebook SDK (PHP, java or any other language) and moderate it so that only employees can use it. That way you can use the existing Facebook features and add the tag clouds and other stuff your boss wants.
I've not used it, but Dolphin might be worth downloading to try out.
elgg.org
LAMP easy to install and setup, looks like your requirements would all be easily satisfied by the official plugins that are available.
Another option: http://buddypress.org/