Greetings to all the Appianites out there!
I have a client organization who adopted Appian, over a decade ago, to build one application in its own data center. They didn't keep up with the product upgrade (like any undisciplined DIY jobs). The application is now wrought with all kinds of issues and the stakeholders is second guessing Appian and contemplating changing horses, though I believe a more sensable approach is just to rebuild the app on latest version of Appian on Managed Cloud.
To convince the client to stay with Appian, some facts on the revolutionary Appian product improvements could be super helpful. I started my Appian journey only about 5 years ago. Hence I have little knowledge of what it might feel like working with decade plus old Appian platform. Would be grateful if anyone care to share his/her perspectives, traveling down the memory lane of Appian product evolvement.
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10 years ago, SAIL was still relatively new, everything was on Tempo and we were still importing packages manually in Designer.
True. Need to add DevOps, Component Plugins, Connected Systems.
The only things still the same, are the process modeller and the process reports designer.
But, is that relevant? I mean, what is David's client looking for?
Well, it's certainly informative (and scary at the same time) learning that Tempo was the only front end to dwell on in the early days. Yikes! When I first set foot in the Appian shrine, SAIL was already fairly smooth. I always thought it a liittle awkward to have something like Tempo hanging around, which is half-baked at best. Now it starts to make sense with this historical context.
All thoughts are helpful. Going back to the topic what specific challenges the client is looking to address, it's more about handling "complex case management" use cases than UI/UX.
Despite 90% of the Appian apps out there has case management elements in nature, Appian doesn't have an explicit case management framework (like Pega does). The implicit design pattern is the record-centric solution model. I'm excited at the rollout of Appian Data Fabric (record sync and CDT-less development become possible). But those are changes took place in recent years. I'd be curious what Appian records might look like a decade ago.
Was CDTs and Data Stores.
Data Fabric is very nice indeed - one of my favorite new features.
IMHO you do not need any specific means of a "Case Management" framework. This is just where Pega is coming from historically. And depending on your business and your understanding of how to conduct that business, "Case Management" can mean everything.
Appian is NOT made for pure/mostly Create-Read-Update-Delete Database-UI type of applications. Design proper business processes, try to be as process driven as possible and add free-style/case-management elements only as necessary.
https://appian.rocks/2022/12/05/make-software-conduct-the-process/