Freely Available, Low-Cost Workflow Application Development Platforms

I’m often asked why issue management solutions such as Atlassian’s JIRA application, have found such favor with so many organizations worldwide. The JIRA product is targeted squarely at system and software development organizations that need a robust platform for managing issues, work requests, and change management with version control.

Over the years however, the JIRA product has been “morphed” by the community and Atlassian to be configured to manage a broad range of workflow and business process-based applications, that have nothing at all to do with system and software development.

So why would stakeholders and managers consistently choose JIRA for business process automation projects, when there were clearly other workflow and BPM applications better suited to meet their needs?

The answer to this question is similar to the answer to the question of why Open Source solutions such as Linux, Apache, Open Office, and thousands of other system and software platforms have become the platform of choice for many commercial and nonprofit organizations.

The 3.x version of JIRA was provided in much the same manner as Open Source solutions such as Linux and Apache web server. The software was easily accessible to developers and provided free for organizations to use, without requiring organizations to incur costs associated with licensing, per-seat user and support maintenance. Competing commercial workflow and business process management applications were only offered to managers and application developers with the usual “trappings”: engagements with sales representatives, 30-day “trials”, complex licensing agreements and fees, per-user/seat costs, maintenance contracts, training and conversion fees, etc. Yuk.

Did I mention that the latest version of JIRA (v4.x) is provided to qualified nonprofit organizations for free? How about a 10-user developer’s license for the Enterprise Edition of JIRA for $10? We’re not talking “Academic” or “non-commercial use” only software editions here; we’re talking the same commercial software made available to nonprofits and developers, for free or low cost, with full technical and end-user support provided by Atlassian and the user community.

The difference between solutions like JIRA as compared to competing solutions, comes down to Atlassian enabling organizations to use JIRA v3.x to develop and deploy fully functional workflow-based applications. Competing commercial vendors rely on organizations to commit to their solution first, which involves varying levels of “pain” for stakeholders, managers and application developers alike, before granting access to fully functional software and support services. There lies the difference in the marketing strategies, and the primary reason that JIRA continues to be applied as a solution when better commercial solutions are available.

There are some BPM application vendors that have taken note of Atlassian’s JIRA marketing strategy. These companies are actively working to make it easier and more affordable for managers and application developers to access fully functional versions of their commercial products so custom “proof of concept” applications can be developed and deployed. This supports the “try before you buy” strategy, which is a much easier sell, as compared to the “jump through all of the hoops and pray that the solution truly works as advertised” approach.

Some of my favorites include ProcessMaker, a BPM platform developed by Colosa. Colosa has been hard at work over the years developing their commercial version of ProcessMaker, along with their ProcessMaker Community Edition. The ProcessMaker Community Edition Wiki has come a long way in the past year.

The wiki provides links to free ProcessMaker resources, such as documentation, tutorials, workflow libraries and the like. The ProcessMaker how-to screen casts available on YouTube are a step in the right direction, though they all need to be replaced by high-definition videos. The current screen casts I viewed were either too small to make out any detail, or too fuzzy (captured in low-definition mode) to be of any practical use to developers. I’m told that this is being addressed by Colosa, so let’s hope to see some updated ProcessMaker videos on YouTube in the near future.

Enough progress has been made this past year however, that I’ve decided to re-evaluate ProcessMaker Community Edition. The goal of my re-evaluation is to determine whether the Community Edition of ProcessMaker, along with the free documentation and support services, can enable commercial and nonprofit organizations to develop full-functional “proof-of-concept” BPM solutions for free or low-cost.

Another emerging star is BizAgi, which offers its process modeller software for free for commercial use. BizAgi has made significant investments in providing free documentation and tutorials, to support ease of adoption by both managers and application developers.

BizAgi is designed for production deployment on a Microsoft Windows platform. In digging into the detailed technical specifications, I did find indications that the Enterprise edition of BizAgi is slowly migrating to Linux-based application database and server solutions. This migration makes sense if BizAgi is targeted large enterprises, as UNIX/LINUX database and application server platforms are more prevalent as compared to MS Windows database/application server solutions.

What are your favorite free or low-cost workflow or BPM application development platforms?

There are certainly some other emerging stars in the marketplace that I have left unmentioned. Post your favorites and share you experiences; help get the word out to nonprofits, small businesses and application developers that all need free and low-cost BPM application development alternatives to expensive commercial workflow and BPM solutions.