Showing posts with label Comparison. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Comparison. Show all posts

Monday 2 January 2023

Power Platform Competitors

Overview:  I like Power Platform, but there are other options out there.  Most products that are competitors cover a piece of what the Power Platform covers.

Mendix: A friend has used Mendix and they were not a fan.  I have played around and I like the product.  I certainly haven't found it's limitations but it feels straight forward and logical.  Easy to learn. 

Cons: 

  1. The publishing is very slow
  2. Free version you have to use Mendix subdomain.  Basic plan is $50/month, for my small demo, it a high price,


Outsystems:

Airtable:  Has lots of templates and easily connects to various data sources.  Easy to extend or build apps on the platform. Provides storage and low code apps.  It's like having Dataverse and Power Apps.  There are pre-built templates to get the team off to a start.

Nintex: Bought K2 and have a long history in workflows (workflows for SharePoint and O365), screen/form generation and form building.  If your company uses Nintex then worthwhile but I wouldn't use it for new projects or if the team does not have significant experience.

UiPath: RPA tool. A strong tool for automation, from a desktop automation and recording piece I feel UiPath is ahead of Power Automate Desktop (PAD).  Both UiPath and Power automate allow for attended and unattended runs.  PAD is part of Power Automation Premium or Power Automate Process licences. Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism are other big players in the RPA space.

Postman Workflows: Bit of a dark horse but people love postman and i think this may become a interesting option for Rapid development.

Amazon:  AWS has various services that allow for Low Code solutions.  "Amazon Honeycode" is kind of like Model driven & Canvas apps, that can call Lambda's.  Lamda's are the same service as Azure Functions on AWS.  AWS Honeycode has predifined templates as staring points so I feel it is more like Salesforce's low code approach. This allows the developer to break out an write complex logic or persist the database in S3 storage.  "Amazon QuickSight" works like Power BI for reporting on solution data.

Salesforce Lightening: Allows for building custom apps and utilising Salesforce CRM and it's data. 

Retool: Good set of connectors to API's.


Appian: 

OutSystems: 

Monday 24 August 2020

AWS vs Azure services offering comparison for Solution Architects

Overview: Microsoft provides a useful list that allows me to know AWS services aligned to Azure Services.  This is pretty useful if you know 1 platform considerably better than another to quickly figure out your options on either AWS or Azure.

My Service comparison notes:

Amazon CloudWatch - same as Azure Monitor.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) – SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostGress and Aurora (Amazon’s proprietary database).  

Azure SQL lines up with Amazon's RDS SQL Server Service.  Although Aurora is probably also worth the comparison as it's AWS's native DB option.

Amazon DynomoDB – Same as CosmosDB – NoSQL database.

AWS API Gateway - Azure API Management

Amazon Redshift is the data warehouse.  Can be encrypted and isolate.  Support Petabytes of data.

Amazon ElastiCache run Redis cache and MemCached (simple cache).

AWS Lamda – Azure Functions. i.e. Serverless.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk – Platform for deploying and scaling web apps & Services.  Same as Azure App services.

Amazon SNS – Pub/Sub model – Azure Event Grid.

Amazon SQS – Message queue.  Same as Azure Storage Queues and Azure Service Bus.

Amazon Step Functions – Workflow. Same as logic apps

AWS Snowball – Same as Azure Box.  Physically copy and transport to data centre for upload.

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) – Azure virtual network 

Amazon AppStream - Azure VDI (Virtual desktop) I think.

Amazon QuickSight - Power BI (Tableau Business Intelligence).

AWS CloudFormations - ARM and Bicep

Tip: I am glad that I did the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam as it helped my understand of the AWS offering which has been very useful in large integration projects.  I have worked with AWS IaaS (EC2, API gateway and S3 historically).  Like Azure, there are a lot of Services and features.  Basically, there are equivilant services for Azure & AWS.  It may be a 2-to-1 service offering or it is not something offered by the cloud provider.

Sunday 20 May 2018

Visual Studio Code - IDE Tips

VS Code - Short cuts
Ctrl + S = Save the current page
Alt+ Shift + A = Comment out multiple lines
Ctrl + / = Comment out a single line of code, same cmd to toggle the comment off

VS Code is perfect for comparing two files.  Select the two source file, right click > Select to Compare >

Sunday 18 January 2015

What are SharePoints Competitor Products

Overview:  SharePoint does not stack up against any single COTS product easily due to the size and functionality offered.  This post is my opinion, and I am not an expert in any of the competing products.

Updated: 2018/06/13

A few years back I wrote a post that is still somewhat relevant form SP 2010 competitors.

This post aims to list competitor products in a broad sense and tries to highlight the areas that where the product and SharePoint perform a similar function.
  • Atlassian Confluence
  • Alfresco
  • Documentum
  • eRooms
  • Lotus Notes
  • EMC’s Center Stage
  • Google docs
  • Slack - Very similar to Teams from MS
  • ClickUp - project management but has chat, stores docs, calendars, time tracking, links, similar to MS Teams and Slack but from a project management focus. Update: 25/06/2022
Beehive from Oracle lines up to Lync, Exchange/Outlook and SharePoint
OpenText, lines up some of SP's functionality such as blogs, Wikis and document collaboration.
Search competitors:
  • Endeca (Oracle)
  • Autonomy (HP)
  • Google Search Appliance or Google mini
  • Coveo
  • Solr (check this out)
CMS Competitors
  • Sitecore
  • Umbraco
  • Drupal
OneDrive: Dropbox, Drop, Google docs
Skype: Zoom
Planner: Trello

More Info:
http://www.extended-content.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Gartner-Magic-Quadrant-For-Enterprise-Search.pdf
If anyone has further information, please reply as this is not an exhaustive set of lists.  My experience with rival products is relatively limited.


Tuesday 14 May 2013

Compare Files Easily

Problem:  Often need to compare files and i recently had such a case where I needed to check PS1 and xml based files on my build server needed to be the same as in TFS.  I had been fairly slack and needed to verify they were the same. 

Resolution: BeyondCompare is a great tool for comparing files but I really like CodeCompare from Devart.  It has VS 2010 integration as well as the console that is shown below.


http://www.devart.com/codecompare/
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/dace3633-0b51-4629-85d4-c59cdce5bb3b/

Friday 16 November 2012

List of SP2013 improvements

My SP2013 Favourite Changes
This list is just random thoughts pls add your comments and I'll make it longer.
  1. Delta's for Document management (don't use a full version for each version of an Office document),
  2. Sparse columns,
  3. WCM (cross site collection navigation OOTB, improved publishing & page size options),
  4. Search is 1 product (FAST & SP Search),
  5. App model (development options are more numerous),
  6. REST (OData) is a 1st class citizen - improved access to REST API/external access to services such as search,
  7. .NET 4.5 instead of .NET 3.5 (Workflow is a big winner),
  8. Workflow (Workflow in SP2010 is better than MOSS) but performance and architecture is greatly improved,
  9. Side by side Enterprise and standard edition CAL's to lower TCO,
  10. Sticky sessions no longer needed - distribute cache is shared,
  11. SharePoint 365 is awesome,
  12. People search is even better with less customisations being required - OOTB it does more,
  13. UPS has 3 sync options in SP2013 as opposed to 1 method in SP2010 - the simpler AD sync and an option to link to FIM (beautiful),
  14. Improved OOTB pdf support,
  15. SkyDrive Pro 2013 replaces Workspace (may not be good but I do like SkyDrive),
  16. OWA is a separate product not bundled with SP2010 as a Service Application.
  17. Licencing (simplified and cheaper, OWA is free.  Search which is the FAST replacement is part of SP2013.  There is no longer a separate Internet (FIS) and Internal SP Server licence.)
  18. Search-Driven content
  19. Search Provides html previews without OWA.  OWA adds previews/thumbs for search results on Office documents.  I believe pdf can also be setup with some work.
  20. Search has REST API that support requests in both Keyword Query Language (KQL) and FAST Query Language (FQL).

 Comparison of the SP2013 On-Premise editions
 

Wednesday 6 June 2012

SharePoint Competitors

Overview:  This post looks to examine what are SharePoint's competitor products for Enterprise Collaboration.  As SharePoint is an amalgamation of several Microsoft server products which has made it extremely big it is difficult to have 1-to-1 mapping for competitor products.  Additionally SharePoint has many complementary products such as Lync which competitors product stacks may bundle as part of their product.  In short this is a very rough list and certainly open to addition.  Pls let me have you comments and suggestions.

SharePoint's EMC competitors:
 Gartner EMC magic Quadrant 2011 

Cisco Quad - Cisco Quad is an recently launched enterprise collaboration platform designed for social, mobile, visual, and virtual collaboration. Tight integration with WebEx (Lync replacement).  Believe Cisco Quad has good integration with Documentum.  2015/02.03: Product is no longer being sold.
Oracle Beehive - Oracles product stack is comprehensive and with addons and integration it covers a wide spectrum of services needed in Enterprises.
IBM Lotus - I'm not a big fan of Lotus Notes but depending on your organisations existing infrastructure and preferences definitely worth considering.  IBM product stack is comprehensive but the tie-in to the vendor is a big consideration.
OpenText -  Lightweight functionality but if you want blogs, wikis and document collaboration, a viable option.

Friday 13 August 2010

SharePoint 2010 Software Licencing

Rough idea of pricing excluding VAT.  This is not from Microsoft and pricing is not fixed as I have laid it out in this post.  Saying that, please consult a licencing expert most resellers such as HP have licencing experts to help you, this is merely a guide to help you get started.  Without further procrastination ...
Windows 2008 & SharePoint is priced on a per server basis.  SQL is charged at a per processor licence.  Software assurance is about and additional 28-30/year.
  • Windows 2008 R2 standard x64 - £2,5k
  • SharePoint Std Internet - 5,5K ?
  • SharePoint Ent Internet - 20K ?
  • SharePoint Std Internal - 3K ?
  • SharePoint Ent Internal - ?
  • SharePoint Std CAL £45/cal
  • SharePoint Ent CAL £80/cal
  • SQL 2008 R2 Std/proc £3,5k
  • SQL 2008 R2 Ent/Proc £14k
Software Assurance: MS sell software assurance, this entitles you to upgrade over the period of the SA agreement charged at about 30% per year. If the new version of the product is due for release and you will move to the new version in the next year or 2, Software assurance may be a good option. However as SP2010 has just been re4lease and SharePoint 15 is due some time in 2014, the cost of SA for that period would be more than buying the SP15 software (assuming prices stay the same). It is a per circumstances decision but I would opt to buy the SP2010 without SA, in 2014 buy new licences and the cost will most likely be lower for the upgrade and it will allow for a in-place upgrade (I.e. SP2010 and SP2014 would run next to each other until everything is upgraded). I would personally prefer to do the upgrade as it will keep the systems cleaner, have better performance and allow for a safer upgrade. Also not you can use Enterprise agreements and stop paying SA but the key if to look at minimising the cost of SharePoint licences over a 5 or 6 year period.

Tip: Licencing prices change depending on factors such as volume discounts, types of licences, software assurance, are you a charity, are you buying or renting licences.  This post takes a simplistic view of SharePoint licencing and is not Microsoft's policy but merely to help mine the licencing minefield that faces most big software projects.  Please consult a licencing expert, it will save you time and money.
Tip: Windows External Connector licences for Windows 2008 (Needed for SharePoint 2010 Internet licences if the external users will use any file or print functionality provided by Windows)
More Info:
Microsoft's SharePoint Licencing
Development Platform Stack (SharePoint versions for developers)
Update: 15 Nov 2010 - Microsoft SharePoint 2010 for Internet explained A good document explaining mix of Internet and Intranet usage
SharePoint 2010 version comparisons
 Licencing explained -
Ari's blog - licencing
http://stovereffect.com/2010/07/03/sharepoint-2010-licensing-part-v-sharepoint-2010-licensing-costs/
Lync licencing - Office Communicator 2007 R2 upgrade
Developer & UAT licences would be covered by MSDN/technet subscriptions.  Technet does not include Visual Studio 2010.

VS2010 & TFS licencing

   ========
Example to explain licencing
Scenario:
We have 700 internal users with AD accounts.  We have 15 external suppliers with a total of 2000 users that access our SP2010 system.  We have a dedicated physical SQL Server 2008 R2 std edition and 2 SharePoint NLB Windows 2008R2 std edition web servers.  What licences do we need? 
Assumptions:
Prices are my estimated guess.
Software assurance (SA) is not selected, simply multiply by 1.6 for a rough figure.
Resolution:
3 Windows 2008 R2 licences for the SQL box and 2 web servers.  +-£7K
SQL Server licences charged at per CPU.  4CPUs for +-£14K
SP2010 Std edition licences for the 700 internal users at £3K/server for 2 servers +- £6K
SP2010 Std edition licences for the external/Internet licence users at £5,5K/server for 2 servers +- £11K
700 Std user SP2010 cal's @£45/user  +- £31,5K
Total Software estimate:  £69.5K
Note: As you can see you have to pay for 4 server licences on 2 servers.  Those astute people out there may realise that you could add 2 more SP 2010 servers to your farm without paying for and more SP licences.  Only think is you need to then only allow internal access on the Internal servers and Internet access to the external SP server.

Development Licences
Technet covers all development licences you will need with the exception of Visual Studio.  MSDN licencing includes Visual Studio 2010.  Visual Studio Ultimate, & Professinal can be purchase individually or through MSDN.
TFS 2010 (Team Foundation Server) has 3 ways to get licences:
  • MSDN - individual all versions get 1 instance licence & 1 Cal with a MSDN subscription.
  • Volume licencing – each person accessing TFS server needs a Cal.
  • Retails – Organisation gets 1 instance of TFS & 5 Cal’s. Approx £500.
Any TFS instance needs SQL 2008 standard edition, this is included in the TFS licence.  Can't use this free version of SQL Server for anything else.

Update 8 Mar 2011: Ari Bakker Post of Web Parts by SP licence Type
Update 10 Nov 2011: Technet

More Info:
http://stovereffect.com/2010/07/01/sharepoint-2010-licensing-part-iii-search-office-web-applications-and-project-server/
http://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/microsoft-licensing/30-licensing/1458-sharepoint-server-2010-licensing.html