- SAP integration – R/Link and Seamless Form Integration when sending data
- Access management options: Used in an Anti-Money Laundering (AML) project
I would like to see improvements in the web client and the workflow engine.
What is most valuable?
How has it helped my organization?
The product allowed organizations to move and accelerate their paper-based business flows into electronic ones. The SAP integration is always very valuable for the clients. It structures and organizes documents with easy access across the company.
What needs improvement?
I think that the biggest area for improvement is for their core component, the Java Core Server (JCS).
In addition, there could be improvement in the following areas:
- Saperion web client: Does not support many rich-client features and is inconsistent between thin and thick clients
- The VBA macro API was very poor
- No real toolset provided
- No debugging options
- Workflow engine
- No official and supported procedure of deploying/moving a solution between stages, which was officially stated by the vendor
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used this solution for over three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We have had numerous issues with stability. Support pointed out it might be due to a 32-bit installation, instead of 64-bit one. Asking the support team for help and investigation did not resolve any of the issues.
At system peak times, the system was very likely to crash, resulting in restarting the servers.
There were many actions taken by the development team to resolve that. One action was moving all other services to another server. In other words, it involved freeing up as many resources as possible and all suggested configuration triggers. We didn`t manage to resolve this.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
There are issues here. There is actually no good pattern to extend the solution in our standard understanding of scaling up. This solution is sort of a monolith.
How are customer service and technical support?
When there were many organizational changes on the vendor`s side, I would give technical support a rating of 3/10.
When I was dealing with this platform, we raised hundreds of incidents. Some of them, such as bugs very critical for the client, were resolved after two and a half years. Some of them still haven’t been resolved.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
As a partner and software vendor, we were in a way forced to deploy this solution.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It needs a database to be available and a piece of system storage in most basic cases.
This is an MIS click-by-click installation, where only Win stations are recognized. This part of the system is documented.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
There were two pricing models, per user and concurrent. From a technical point of view, the same installation is done in both cases.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We also evaluated Alfresco, SER Doxis4, and Hyland OnBase. Apart from the first one, in which we could only evaluate a community edition, they seemed to be modern, well-designed enterprise ECM solutions. Unfortunately, we had no chance to run a test project with the other solutions.
What other advice do I have?
Do not follow this path. This is a very tough platform to implement anything apart from some simple-case scenarios. You have to be very cautious in gathering requirements and even more with evaluating them.
Even simple tasks may be hard to implement, as this is VBA-like scripting language in most cases.
For Java programmers, there is not much satisfaction in such projects. There might be a piece for them, but only with the integration server which is JBoss, a Saperion toolset, and a pure Java-based library.
