In 2020, more than 4.35 million enterprise applications were developed; that’s a whopping 24.13 percent more than 2019.

–  US Business Formation Statistics (BFS) report

The latest market studies predict that 2020’s app development momentum will undoubtedly carry into 2021. Yet, hiring talented app developers is especially difficult for organizations amid a developer drought and pandemic uncertainties. According to the latest US labor statistics, the shortage of app developers in the US will exceed 1.2M by 2026. If this talent shortage is not plugged, the country could face an unrealized output of $162B!

Low/No-code solutions are the most viable way to tackle the talent shortage and budgetary constraints. There has been a lot of buzz around No-code development. Such solutions were clear winners in 2020. They were successful in narrowing the divide between programmers and non-programmers – enabling teams to innovate and transform business processes.

Today, No-code solutions are altering the landscape of enterprise application development. It is making application development just as simple as using Word or PowerPoint, thereby enabling any average business user to move projects forward without the extra engineering costs (in money or time). Experts believe that No-code development is the ultimate panacea to meet the rapid and complex app development requirements of the times without hiring costly talents. It helps leverage the internal talent within an organization and enables app development for all.

SharePoint and No-code App Development

In its recent Magic Quadrant Report, Gartner recognized SharePoint as the Leader among Content Services Platforms for the fourth year in a row. The report stated that the SharePoint ecosystem is growing faster than ever and is today used by over 200 million users to simplify collaboration, communication, and content management. Thousands of custom apps are further enriching the user experience and enhancing the functionalities of the SharePoint platform. SharePoint custom apps enable employees to perform their daily tasks better and faster and empower organizations to automate, streamline and enhance their business processes for better yield and business results.

In the last few years, No-code tools have penetrated the realm of SharePoint custom app development and altered the existing edifice. This development approach has mitigated the roadblocks organizations faced with the traditional app development approach. In a traditional setup, employees submit a request to an IT queue to pull a report, make a change, launch a product, etc. After request submission, they have to keep waiting infinitely for the IT team to respond. And often the wait is lengthy, with no feedback loop, and a backlog to hire the engineers to perform the task. By the time the results are delivered, most requirements have probably changed and employees are already raising submitting new requests.  

No-code solutions allow power users to leverage their business knowledge to build impactful SharePoint solutions without any coding and dependence on IT. This has significantly reduced the costs and complexities involved in a SharePoint custom app development project. No-code tools enable users to rapidly build solutions with point-and-click configuration and visual-based design. As a result, solution development timelines are up to 80% quicker, allowing an organization to keep up with the dizzying pace of technology development. 

Why No-code is an Imperative for SharePoint App Development in 2021?

75% of all application development will use Low/No-code platforms in 2021, up from 44% in 2020.

• Forrester’s 2021 prediction  

No-code emerged as a big business disruptor last year, 2021 is witnessing such tools become a mainstay for SharePoint custom app development. Such tools are enabling teams to rapidly build apps that shape better business outcomes, automate processes and solve various technology bottlenecks. It is helping organizations stay agile, empower employees and achieve more with less. Other reasons that make No-code adoption an imperative for SharePoint app development in 2020 are:

#1: Catalyzes a Move towards Business Automation

Business automation is a major buzzword for business operations. Successful business automation leads to streamlining of processes, efficient workflows, and elimination of challenges associated with manual processes. While many organizations have already ventured on their business automation journeys, there is still a long way to go. No-code is a strong enabler of business automation. It allows the rapid development of custom SharePoint applications without a single line of code, through visual designing and easy-to-use features. It makes business automation easy to implement for organizations of all types and sizes. No-code tools enable organizations to depart from traditional processes that hamper the effectiveness and digital success and instead move towards digital empowerment.

Delivers on the “Data for Everyone” Promise

The global pandemic has demonstrated the importance of empowering everyone with the right data and at the right time. As the sole content repository for a growing number of organizations, SharePoint lists, libraries, sites, or site collections are filled with insights that can propel an organization to the next level. No-code tools allow organizations to empower their employees to glean actionable insights from various datasets and enable decision-makers to make data-backed decisions. With No-code tools, business users can create impactful reports and dashboards by bringing together data from multiple sources. And all this can be achieved without any IT dependence.

Fosters a Culture of Innovation

A recent Gartner study discovered that through 2020, 91% of organizations engaged in some form of digital transformation initiative. However, digital transformation isn’t about changing a few processes here and there or implementing one or two innovative technologies to enhance a business’s performance and efficiency. It is much more than that. Digital transformation is all about transforming a business’s model, processes, people, outlook, and operations using advanced digital technology. It’s about transforming the entire organization not just parts, but completely. No-code tools champion digital transformation by empowering employees to build SharePoint applications themselves (with the least training), instead of relying on the support of their respective IT departments. When equipped with the tools to build impactful solutions on their own, the mindset of the employees’ shifts. This eventually leads to a digital snowball effect throughout the organization, making the digital transformation initiative a resounding success.

Compliments the “cloud-only” trend

2020 saw a massive exodus of organizations from SharePoint’s on-premise versions towards SharePoint Online (Microsoft 365). The sudden emergence of COVID-19 and its resulting remote working scenario forced many organizations to transition to the cloud. No-code app development tools helped ensure business continuity and high user adoption for organizations. Leveraging No-code, organizations could recreate hundreds of business-critical apps on the new platform at blazing fast speed. Availability of familiar SharePoint apps from day one after the move triggered positive user adoption in almost all scenarios. No-code tools also enable organizations to unlock new opportunities for innovation and future-proof all app innovations. With no-code platforms, organizations can attain new levels of productivity in the cloud.

Ensuring Business Growth in Challenging Times

While most of us hoped that the impact of the pandemic will fade away, the situation seems to have improved marginally in 2021 with lurking fear of a new wave. Therefore, organizations must continue to reduce operating costs and ensure business growth in a hybrid working scenario. A Forrester survey found that “enterprises that embrace Low/No-code platforms react faster and more effectively than firms relying only on traditional development.”  No-code tools help organizations cut costs that would be otherwise spent in paying professional SharePoint developers to build powerful applications. No-code also reduces time and significantly increases productivity, making it an important enabler of business growth even during such trying times.

“The future of coding is no coding at all.”

– Chris Wanstrath, CEO at GitHub

In an age where the demand for impactful SharePoint apps far exceeds the supply of quality developers, No-code development solutions are increasingly growing in popularity. In 2021 and beyond, such tools will become commonplace for application development of all kinds. This technology will empower non-technical business experts to bring together data and assemble software functions in the domains they know best, without any coding. Even the programmer purists, still working with hard-coding tools will recognize the convenience such tools bring toward their work. No-code SharePoint application development tools are a must-have for organizations that want to stay ahead of the game in 2021.

QuickApps is a No-code SharePoint application development and business process automation solution that is packed with powerful web apps. It enables business experts to create applications and automate business processes at an 80% faster turnaround time with a simple point-and-click configuration. Download a FREE TRIAL now to transform the SharePoint app development experience.

Amit Gupta

Associate Director – Product Development

Amit Gupta plays a key role in incubating and establishing best SharePoint practices at AgreeYa. He is closely associated with the Product Development and Delivery team and works to find new solutions based on Microsoft technology and optimize performance and responsiveness for our clients. He can be reached at amit.g@agreeya.com

Consumer and business digital adoption has vaulted five years forward in only about a few weeks in light of COVID-19.

– McKinsey & Company Study

The world we live in has dramatically changed within a year. The rapid pace of technology development is shaping the way organizations operate in more ways than one. Like the private sector, a digital transformation is no longer an option but rather a necessity for government organizations.  Gartner predicts that by 2023, more than 80% of the government’s digital implementations that do not build on a technology platform will fail to meet objectives. Consequently, government organizations need to quickly address their decaying technology infrastructure and become productive members of the digital ecosystem.

Most government CIOs recognize that their agencies must remain agile and innovative to stay vital in this digital-first era. A 2020 Deloitte survey on digital transformation, including more than 1,200 government officials, discovered that three-fourths of respondents believe that digital technologies are “disrupting the public sector” and 96% of respondents characterized the impact on their domain as “significant”. Today, digital transformation has become an absolute imperative for governments. It empowers government department and agencies to improve services, support economic recovery, reduce costs, ensure resiliency, and increase secure collaboration through the crisis and beyond.

Historically, SharePoint and Microsoft 365 have been great starting points for digital transformation initiatives. More than 200 million users and 250,000 organizations around the world use SharePoint as their sole platform for information management and enterprise collaboration. As a top-rated and trusted product, it enables government agencies to strengthen collaboration, manage documents, projects, and content better, and build essential applications for operational efficiencies and better citizen services. With SharePoint, government agencies can lift the bar and compete with the service levels and operating standards of the private sector.

How does No-code Fit in?

2021, the market demand for app development will grow at least five times faster than IT capacity to deliver it.

– Gartner study

SharePoint apps are a big part of SharePoint’s appeal. It enables the private and public sector organizations alike to utilize SharePoint data in more meaningful ways to enhance the quality of services. However, with the traditional SharePoint app development approach the entire workplace modernization and digital transformation become an IT-dependent initiative.

A No-code app development platform empowers government departments and agencies to rapidly build and deploy custom apps without the need for time-consuming coding. It empowers business experts to seamlessly build apps and automate business processes leveraging simple point-and-click configuration. Such a platform helps agencies slash the app development costs and thereby the digital transformation budget while delivering continuous improvement in operating standards through innovative apps.

Benefits of No-code platforms towards Government Digital Transformation

#1: Engage with your Citizens better

No-code platforms have been altering the landscape of SharePoint application development and driving digital transformation. Gartner forecasts that No/Low-code application development platforms will account for 65 percent of all app development by 2024. It enables government agencies to transform and modernize their applications faster and better. With a No-code platform, governments are better equipped to meet the citizens’ expectations. It enables transparent, consistent, and omnichannel service delivery to citizens. Government department and agencies have been making efforts to expedite services for their citizens. However, constrained budgetary provisions often limit the ability of governments to achieve such goals. No-code application development allows government bodies with limited resources to develop high-quality and user-friendly applications for citizens.

#2: Transform Business Experts into Citizen Developers

No-code platforms bridge the gap between business knowledge and coding skills. It brings in business experts with a deep understanding of processes into SharePoint app development. It establishes a culture of “development for everyone”, wherein the users can leverage a point-and-click environment to build impactful business applications and automate processes. What’s more, governments do not have to depend on the overburdened IT team or wait for prolonged periods to roll out new apps. They can swiftly design, develop and launch SharePoint apps to redefine citizens’ experience.

#3: Replace Legacy Systems with More Efficient Processes

A core principle of digital transformation is to modernize the arduous and slow-moving legacy processes. Successful government departments and agencies are today aiming to replace siloed systems that weigh less on productivity and high on maintenance with faster and scalable processes. No-code platforms can be leveraged to build robust new applications with minimal investment and disruption. Such apps are faster, readily adaptable, and highly scalable per the changing needs of the government sector.  

#4: Launch Data-driven Initiatives for Citizens

SharePoint is the single repository of mission-critical information for a growing number of government agencies and departments. It contains data and insights which could enable governments to launch new citizen initiatives, boost productivity, increase process transparency, and achieve cost savings. However, fetching useful data from SharePoint requires specialized coding skills. Powered with a No-code platform, the government staff can build applications and dashboards to automate data discovery and analysis. As a result, the stakeholders are empowered with better insights to launch successful campaigns.   

 #5: Enable Faster Roll-out of SharePoint Applications

Government agencies can rapidly develop and deploy applications with a No-code platform to further accelerate their speed of implementing new processes. This has been especially critical to facilitate a digital workplace during and beyond the pandemic. No-code platforms can enable paperless and automated administration by transforming day-to-day functions and bridging silos for improved collaboration.

Catalyze Government Digital Transformation with QuickApps

No-code platforms are a must adopt for government agencies and departments that seek to revitalize their processes and services with a new approach to work. QuickApps is a leading No-code SharePoint application development and business process automation solution that is packed with powerful web apps. The solution is today leveraged by a growing number of public sector organizations to create powerful applications and automate business processes at an 80% faster turnaround time with a simple point-and-click configuration. Download a FREE QUICKAPPS TRIAL to avoid roadblocks and succeed with your Government Digital Transformation journey.

Amit Gupta

Associate Director – Product Development

Amit Gupta plays a key role in incubating and establishing best SharePoint practices at AgreeYa. He is closely associated with the Product Development and Delivery team and works to find new solutions based on Microsoft technology and optimize performance and responsiveness for our clients. He can be reached at amit.g@agreeya.com

Digital transformation is not a new concept that emerged in 2020. The need for digital transformation has existed many years prior and will continue long after the Pandemic fades away. Having said that, the pandemic has significantly intensified and accelerated the need for digital transformation. A recent Gartner study revealed that 91% of organizations are engaged in some form of digital transformation initiative. Additionally, Nuxeo research found that the pandemic has made digital transformation #1 priority for 70% of organizations.

With a successful digital transformation initiative, organizations can streamline processes, enhance productivity, and drive revenue growth. Such an initiative can enable organizations to adapt to the changing business landscape, innovate seamlessly, and gain a competitive advantage. However, many organizations find digital transformation challenging to implement. A study by McKinsey and Co. showed that 70% of transformation projects fail to meet some of their goals!

No-code: The Catalyst to Digital Transformation

No-Code application development is helping organizations avoid the bumps in their digital transformation journey. Such solutions enable organizations and teams to create and deploy business-critical applications at unprecedented speed allowing digital transformation at any time scale. Such deployments are characterized by intense modularity, flexibility, and agility. No-code solutions foster an environment of creativity and innovation to deliver game-changing business results. They bring in the full diversity of stakeholders to input their specialized skills and personal expertise into the application development process. The final products are digital transformations that can happen instantaneously and suit the needs of all stakeholders perfectly on the first try. A recent Gartner research suggests “that Low/No-code application platforms will account for 65 percent of all app development by 2024.” While Forrester predicts such technologies are expected to become a $10 billion market.

The business technology landscape is changing at the rate of knots. These rapidly changing times have imposed the need for more and more applications. Organizations need to understand that it is going to be impossible for their IT teams to fulfill this surge in application development demands. Towards this, organizations need to empower their business experts with the right solutions to tackle their app development requirements without overburdening IT. And this is precisely where No-code comes into the equation. It capacitates business users with an understanding of the logic behind the application to build an app by leveraging point-and-click configuration. No-code solutions can automate a lot of the manual labor-intensive business processes and inject speed and efficiency into business operations. 

How No-code is enabling Digital Transformation

Now, let’s dive in and understand how No-code development is benefiting the Digital Transformation initiatives for organizations across the globe.

#1: Bridges the Gap between Technology and Business Expertise

No-code solutions deliver a perfect balance between the experience of the business process and the expertise in application development. By empowering business users to build business applications, an organization can realize untapped potential already present in the workforce. Through 2023, Gartner expects four key democratization aspects to accelerate – the democratization of data and analytics, development, design, and knowledge. No-code solutions are driving this transition towards citizen development. Today, many business users are seamlessly innovating, effectively combining legacy technologies with new technologies, and helping reduce the pressure on IT resources. No-code solutions are empowering employees who understand the process best to create solutions without compromising security and governance.

#2: Increases the Scope for Experimentation

Experimentation plays a significant role in digital transformation. No-code allows organizations to try out different approaches, as the time and resources required are very low. It also enables users to build apps from a plethora of pre-built templates and web apps allowing them to deliver innovative solutions quickly by reassembling ready capabilities. Users can leverage a No-code platform to test ideas on a small scale to identify issues, rectify those, check for the project’s efficiency, and prepare to adapt to the changes faster. The crux of low code makes it easy for users to experiment and create apps that meet their needs in a more personalized way than other off-the-shelf and pricy alternatives. 

#3: Delivers Speed and Agility

In a recent survey by AppSheet, 32% of app creators cited speed of development as one of the greatest benefits of using no-code solutions. Traditional coding is a time and resource-intensive process. The development of an application with the traditional approach usually requires thousands of code lines, followed by fixing code errors (wherein one single colon or click here and there can mess up the code), rigorous testing, and finally deployment. All these aspects make app development a long and cumbersome process.

No-code development solutions speed up the entire process. It eliminates the need for coding. Business users can simply leverage pre-built templates and web apps to integrate the functionality required and create an impactful application. Such platforms can accelerate app development speed by up to 80%. And when talking about errors, the probability of compiler error reduces to a great extent with these platforms.  

#4: Reduces implementation problems

In traditional set-ups, IT departments have to spend a tremendous amount of time trying to fix implementation issues. These issues may include programs that don’t run properly, hardware that doesn’t communicate effectively, and users who can’t understand complicated procedures. No-code solutions can significantly improve the IT department’s productivity by eradicating implementation issues and lessening their workload. Most of the modern-day No-code solutions have a predictive feature that can determine the areas where an implementation issue might occur and take care of them even before they occur.

#5: Bolsters Security and Reduces Risks

No-code solutions are designed following the security best practices and built to withstand modern cybersecurity threats. Before commercial release, such a solution is thoroughly tested for vulnerabilities and flaws. A team of experts makes sure that the generated code is flawless and risk-free. Such a hack-proof code would be nearly impossible to build on custom software outside the No-code platform.

#6: Delivers a Competitive Edge

By enabling users to build applications rapidly, No-code solutions allow organizations to stay nimble and respond to changing business priorities swiftly. Teams can leverage the simple point-and-click configuration to build apps and enhance their productivity. Business dashboards and insightful reports can be created with such solutions enabling business leaders to make data-driven decisions to propel business growth. No-code solutions have a cost-benefit too. As business users can are empowered to self-create applications, organizations don’t have to hire additional developers or pressure IT teams to deliver applications on time. You can easily digitize and automate the processes, improve workflows, and customize applications with No-code, thereby improving overall efficiency.

Digital Transformation is not an option in the current business landscape. It has become an integral component of every organization. According to a McKinsey and Co. report, the majority of organizations who do not respond to embracing digital transformation fail miserably. However, coding-based application development has been one of the foremost hurdles for organizations on their digital transformation journey. It slows down, creates siloes, pressurizes IT, increases costs, and amplifies complexities in digital transformation to frustrate everyone. No-code solutions, such as QuickApps, can address such issues and enable business transformation.

QuickApps is a No-code SharePoint application development and business process automation solution that is packed with powerful web apps. It enables business experts to create applications and automate business processes at an 80% faster turnaround time with a simple point-and-click configuration. Download a FREE TRIAL to avoid roadblocks on your Digital Transformation journey.

Amit Gupta

Associate Director – Product Development

Amit Gupta plays a key role in incubating and establishing best SharePoint practices at AgreeYa. He is closely associated with the Product Development and Delivery team and works to find new solutions based on Microsoft technology and optimize performance and responsiveness for our clients. He can be reached at amit.g@agreeya.com

The pandemic has impacted business priorities irrevocably and in far-reaching ways. Suddenly businesses found they needed to pivot on new technologies to respond rapidly to the changing factors in the market, customer & employee requirements, and new priorities. And automation technologies enabled organizations to meet the demands of the unprecedented times. Consequently, Business Process Automation (BPA) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) emerged among the few winners from this year’s economic turbulence. While RPA injected speed into processes and ensured resource optimization; BPA enabled organizations to balance employee wellbeing with high productivity.

Why SharePoint BPA matters?

Today, Microsoft SharePoint is used by more than 250,000 organizations around the world to strengthen their collaboration and information management. SharePoint is intertwined with most business-critical processes. As a result, the organization-wide implementation of automation can’t be complete without automating your SharePoint based business process. While SharePoint is glorified as an Intranet, information management, and enterprise collaboration solution, but it can be utilized by organizations to automate their essential business processes too.

For most, SharePoint BPA is all about workflows. Such solutions have been around for some years and have enabled organizations to streamline and accelerate their business processes. However, modern No-code SharePoint application development solutions have opened new avenues and helped organizations reimagine SharePoint BPA. Such solutions have empowered users to build SharePoint applications without any coding and IT dependencies. Thereby, such solutions have simplified and accelerated SharePoint app development, enabling organizations to meet their rapidly evolving business needs. With that in mind let us explore most prominent benefits of automating SharePoint business processes.

Benefits of SharePoint BPA

#1: Increase Productivity

The automation of SharePoint business processes reduces the time needed to complete daily tasks. This can enhance productivity across all mundane tasks, with the side benefits of freeing up employees’ time. Employees can use this saved time to concentrate on other complex and revenue-generating activities.

#2: Reduce Time & Costs

Manual tasks, essentially need to be performed one at a time and at a much slower pace than the automated tasks, leading to extra costs. Automation allows organizations to accomplish tasks utilizing fewer resources and in considerably less time.

#3: Streamline Communication

When employees try to pass on information through emails or conversations, there is a high probability of certain relevant details getting lost in translation. An automated system serves as a centralized platform for employees to access and find the information required for the successful completion of their tasks. Updates and documentation are recorded and managed so that all the information remains current. Controls remain in place to prevent overlaying of information and for role-specific access. 

#4: Minimize Errors & Inconsistencies

SharePoint BPA ensures that all the actions are performed identically, leaving no room for error. Each task needs to be performed in a certain manner, without any deviations. This results in improved quality of work and removes any chances of manual errors. It further strengthens compliance adherence for any organization. 

#5: Improve Process Planning

Automation systems, such as dashboards, allow employees to view and monitor where things are standing at any given moment. This helps them manage deadlines efficiently and tweak plans accordingly. For managers, this is useful in managing deadlines and for capacity planning purposes.

#6: Gain Metric Visibility

Modern businesses need to constantly monitor, evaluate, and improve their business strategies if they are to gain a competitive advantage in the industry. All of these are dependent on timely access to accurate business-critical data. The SharePoint BPA utilizing a No-code app can provide the key insights required by an organization to make data-driven decisions.

#7: Standardize Operations

SharePoint BPA systems have rigid guidelines regarding the control of documents and process actions. Such rules eliminate situations where processing steps might be missed or documents misplaced. Employees need not worry about verifying the accuracy of information and tasks; it’s all built-in to the automated system. Such capabilities significantly improve the dependability and reliability of a process.

#8: Empower Employees

Automation enables employees to stay highly productive. While Workflows remove the bottlenecks in a process, No-code automation empowers the employees to build applications that remove the tedious, repetitive, and routine tasks from their daily schedule. The employees who were too busy performing mundane tasks can concentrate on more complex, challenging, and business growth activities. Automation can boost the employee morale and accelerate personal growth.     

#9: Enable Efficient Task Management

Automation helps multiple departments involved in a process to access and have better visibility into the project and tasks. Members do not have to email or call other departments requesting status. Regular monitoring and reminders can be set up within the automated system so that nothing in the process slips through the cracks.  

#10: Establish Better Governance & More Reliability

Consistency is the benchmark of SharePoint BPA, allowing organizations to offer reliable processes to customers and maintain a competitive advantage in the market. The reliability of automated processes ensures that SharePoint governance issues are executed 100% of the time and in accordance with the compliance regulations.

Automation is the future of work!

SharePoint BPA is must adopt for organizations that are already subscribed to SharePoint or Microsoft 365. While workflows have long been the torchbearers of SharePoint BPA, modern-day No-code solutions are helping organizations simplify tedious and time-consuming business process. No-code SharePoint BPA empowers organizational users, unburdens IT, and delivers competitive advantage to the organization. If you are ready to get started with SharePoint BPA, just know that QuickApps can help you. QuickApps is a collection of 21 web apps for SharePoint and 9 web apps for Microsoft 365. As a No-code SharePoint application solution it can empower your business users to create applications at 80% faster turnaround with simple point-and-click configuration. Download a FREE TRIAL to experience how the product can transform your business processes

Amit Gupta

Associate Director – Product Development

Amit Gupta plays a key role in incubating and establishing best SharePoint practices at AgreeYa. He is closely associated with the Product Development and Delivery team and works to find new solutions based on Microsoft technology and optimize performance and responsiveness for our clients. He can be reached at amit.g@agreeya.com

Every industry and area of business is in a state of flux today. To keep pace with these times, it is imperative for organizations to adopt new technologies that minimize operational costs, reduce complexities, optimize productivity, and establish new models for business success. No-code development solutions tick on all the above buckets. They enable organizations to rapidly develop applications and create customizations without any coding and reliance on specialized developers.

Indeed, a No-code platform with its point-and-click configuration provides an easy route to application development for business users rather than professional developers. Consequently, such tools have led to a growing population of what Gartner calls “citizen developers,”.

What exactly is a Citizen Developer?

A citizen developer is a business user who uses No-code solutions to build business-critical applications for consumption by others. They develop applications to facilitate various processes of business operations while following the guidelines and standards set by the IT department. Unlike professional developers, they may not have any formal coding knowledge. Citizen developers may have limited technical or development skills, but they need to have a thorough understanding of the business process. Citizen developers has been a buzzword of the times, and No-code solutions have been big contributors towards this. 

The New Development Wave is Coming

The market for No-code application development tools that support technology-oriented non-technologists is tipped to grow at an exponential rate in the coming years. A Gartner study forecasts that by 2024 Low/No-code will make up more than 65% of all application development activity and three-quarters of large enterprises will use at least four such development tools. Another research by Verified Market Research forecasts that the No-code market will witness a growth of more than 44% annually through 2026.

The overwhelming popularity of No/Low code solutions has also fueled a new wave of developers – the Citizen Developers. A Gartner report suggests that 41% of organizations have active citizen development initiatives and an additional 20% are in the evaluation or planning stage. Additionally, Gartner also found that 41% of modern-day enterprise employees call themselves “business technologists”.

Catalysts for Citizen Development

While the maturing of No-code solutions has been a major force behind the rise of citizen developers, there are some other contributing factors too.

• Cloud Computing: Cloud has been a major contributor to the growth of citizen development. Applications created for cloud platforms are far less dependent on local processors than those written for a single server. Cloud applications can utilize various microservices, which are pre-built chunks of code that have been tested and optimized for performance. As a result, the non-programmers can easily use a Low/No-code solution to build a rich application complementing these microservices.
• Shortage of Skills: Another major driving factor for citizen development is the growing shortage of professional developers. Though there is a disagreement about the exact extent of talent shortfall, it is quite clear that good developers are hard to find and command big salaries. While digital transformation has become a present-day imperative, most organizations are being held back by the shortage of quality developers in their ranks.  
• Resistance is Melting: Gradually, developers and IT teams are becoming more comfortable with the concept of citizen development. They understand the utility of letting business-side colleagues create Low/No-code applications. Leading organizations have already activated their citizen development strategy, which allows the IT to govern and ensure the security of applications developed by the citizen developers.
• No-code Tools are Improving: With growing popularity, the No-code tools are adding sophisticated capabilities too. This Lego-style application development approach, which supported limited customization and development aspects earlier, can now enable the Citizen developers to create different kinds of sophisticated applications that the new-age digital businesses require.
• CIOs are realizing the value: A combination of all the aforementioned factors is leading to a change in the attitude of corporate technology leaders. There is a strong feeling that successful enterprises will operate with a model where most professionals can leverage Low/No-code solutions to create business applications apart from their normal duties. A world where everyone is a developer!

SharePoint and the Citizen Developers

While No-code solutions have been enabling business transformation and facilitating citizen developers across all application development projects, their adoption has become incremental when it comes to reaping dividends from your SharePoint investment. While SharePoint is the most widely used collaboration and content management platform for organizations, it has various out-of-the-box limitations. This is why organizations need to invest time and money in customizing and developing SharePoint applications to tackle their business requirements.

However, SharePoint application development has always been a siloed process owned by the IT department. The complex coding associated with the traditional approach made it difficult for any other department to contribute to the process. But this overdependence on IT has its downsides too. Studies have time and again proved that more than half of SharePoint applications commissioned never see the light of day and a lot many others lose their purpose when released. This is a big mismatch with the nimbleness organizations are after nowadays.

No-code application development has proved to be a gamechanger in this sense. It empowers the business users, aka Citizen Developers, to take control of the SharePoint application development process. By leveraging point-and-click functionality alongside their understanding of SharePoint architecture and the business requirement, users can create applications they need quickly and with minimum (or no) help from IT.

Empower Your Citizen Developers with QuickApps

QuickApps is a popular SharePoint No-code application development and customization solution, pre-packed with a set of powerful web apps to empower your citizen developers. Your business users can leverage this solution to create sophisticated custom solutions without any coding and at 80% faster. What’s more, QuickApps is available for SharePoint On-premise and SharePoint Online versions. Contact us for a free demo of the product.

Amit Gupta

Associate Director – Product Development

Amit Gupta plays a key role in incubating and establishing best SharePoint practices at AgreeYa. He is closely associated with the Product Development and Delivery team and works to find new solutions based on Microsoft technology and optimize performance and responsiveness for our clients. He can be reached at amit.g@agreeya.com

SharePoint is a vast tool. It is the heart of Enterprise Content Management Systems. Its feature set can be split into six separate areas covering social networking, communities and collaboration, search, business intelligence, and much more. Hence, it is suitable for a wide range of uses, intranet, extranet, or website applications.

Mostly, SharePoint out of the box functionalities can satisfy the basic collaboration and communication needs of organizations. However, many organizations may opt for going beyond the core functionality to fulfill their highly specific business needs like including their branding in their application, building business solutions, generating specific reports or creating dashboards, tweaking, or extending the existing functionality.

All these customizations can be implemented with coding. But then the coding is also one of the stinging points for SharePoint users due to the associated complexities, multiple risks, costs, added efforts, and other limitations. Further, coding leads to a lot of complications like variable outcomes and delays in projects. Though SharePoint customization is not a bad idea as it makes the SharePoint environment more useful and relevant to your business needs. However, adopting coding to achieve those customizations may not be a very good approach. 

In this blog, we are going to discuss in detail, why coding for customizing SharePoint is a bad idea; and how better alternatives like no-code SharePoint customization platform can be utilized to achieve SharePoint customizations.

Before we take a deep dive lets also understand why businesses customize SharePoint.

SharePoint has limited out-of-the-box functionality

SharePoint offers a host of out-of-the-box-functionalities, however, at times they may not support an organization’s highly specific business needs. Say, for instance, organizations may want to customize certain business reports, modify dashboards and menus, create a highly personalized intranet portal, or integrate a SharePoint solution with any third-party software.

To extend beyond the out-of-the-box capabilities of SharePoint and to run it smoothly in their business environment, SharePoint users need to do some customization which requires coding. Hence, organizations often spend time in writing some custom code to address their business requirements.

Now, that we understand the reason why organizations go for customizing SharePoint by coding, let’s also understand why writing code for SharePoint customization is a mistake.

It is advised to be doubly sure that your business requirement cannot be solved without custom coding before you jump into it.

Additionally, the rise of citizen developers is another reason why coding is no longer considered a preferred method for making customizations in SharePoint.

According to Gartner,  by 2023, the number of active citizen developers at large enterprises will be at least four times the number of professional developers. This is a big change! And businesses have already moved there.

Business users instead of waiting for their requests to make it to the top of the IT department’s ticket list, they with their little to no coding knowledge — take it upon themselves to make these customizations. Especially, in the current time of the global pandemic, when many organizations are facing resource, budget and other constraints, many business users and citizen developers are using IT-approved tools to build apps and make customizations that are helping them boost productivity, automate workflows, and help their teams work efficiently.

AgreeYa’s QuickApps is an innovative No-code SharePoint solution with a set of pre-built templates and 21 powerful web apps. With QuickApps, business users can build complex business applications for SharePoint On-premise or SharePoint Online 80% faster using simple point-and-click configuration instead of custom coding. So, stop writing code for your varied SharePoint requirements and get a Free Trial today to experience how QuickApps can completely transform your SharePoint experience.

Amit Gupta

Associate Director – Product Development

Amit Gupta plays a key role in incubating and establishing best SharePoint practices at AgreeYa. He is closely associated with the Product Development and Delivery team and works to find new solutions based on Microsoft technology and optimize performance and responsiveness for our clients. He can be reached at amit.g@agreeya.com

As organizations in the U.S. and across the globe reopen slowly after the COVID-19 lockdown, it’s not back to business as usual. Novel Coronavirus remains a very serious risk, and until a vaccine or treatment arrives, businesses need to remain vigilant. Further, it is also quite certain that the ‘New Normal’ in the post-COVID-19 world represents a dramatic restructuring of how businesses have traditionally operated.

The COVID-19 and the consequent post-viral era will challenge the core workings of organizations. Organizations that rely heavily upon SharePoint for their collaboration and information management requirements now need new applications to enhance their efficiency and adjust to the demands of new normal. And this responsibility, in normal situations, would be levied upon the IT department. However, the ongoing crisis has put IT departments under massive pressure to tackle the new challenges of supporting a massive remote workforce. The department is facing a massive resource crunch and time constraint, they are struggling to meet deadlines, which in turn is affecting the overall business outcomes.    No-Code solutions with their point-and-click functionality help organizations to speed up their application releases and address the pressing concerns swiftly. It empowers business users to take control of the business application process and develop without any coding support. Consequently, No-Code platforms are seeing a massive increase in popularity and adoption. Now, let us take a deep dive into the benefits of the No-code SharePoint application development in the “New Normal”.

Benefits of No-code SharePoint Application development in the “New Normal”

#1: Allows organizations to develop applications faster and meet the evolving needs of these unprecedented times

The pandemic has created an immediate need for organizations to commission the development of new and complex SharePoint applications that can support the collaboration and information management requirements of the remote workforce. However, based on the time constraints of the IT department, organizations need to rethink their existing SharePoint application development approach. No-code platforms fit the bill ideally. It enables faster and cost-effective ways of app development, thereby helping businesses meet their rapidly changing objectives. Research suggests that No-code solutions can reduce the overall app development time by about 80%.

#2: Leads to better resource optimization and enables the democratization of innovation

In the new normal, resource optimization through the democratization of innovation and automation are factors that separate the winners from the laggards. Innovation should not be confined within a core group of experts. The growing possibilities of an upcoming global recession mean that each employee needs to be provided with extra responsibilities. No-code platforms allow businesses to empower their employees with the right tool to innovate without dependencies. These simple to use platforms enable the subject matter experts to collaborate, build, and customize their apps conveniently, without undergoing any unnecessary hurdles and bottlenecks that can impede success.

#3: Helps organizations innovate within a small budget or even without any investment

With the threat of a global economic slowdown looming large, businesses need to embrace technologies that can help in cost savings while boosting business efficiency. No-code platforms allow organizations to get this balancing act right. It mitigates the need for hiring costly SharePoint developers to build new applications or customize the existing ones. One-time investment and periodic renewals are the only investments required to keep innovating and building powerful SharePoint applications with No-code solutions.

#4: Delivers applications that can be used to automate resource-intensive and important business processes

Automation is already emerging as the biggest technology trend in the new normal. Effective automation can help employees stay at the peak of their productivity. It helps organizations perform like a smoothly oiled machine and removes the mundane, repetitive tasks from the daily routine. While SharePoint is the lifeline for thousands of organizations across the globe. A large number of enterprise users believe that a significant portion of their productive hours is wasted in performing SharePoint tasks that could be otherwise automated. Today, there are powerful SharePoint No-code platforms that allow organizations to automate their tedious and mundane business tasks and that too without a single line of code.

#5: Releases the IT to focus on supporting the needs of the present remote working scenario

As much as we would like to, there is just no way to know when normalcy will return. For now, it seems that remote working is here to stay and that means the IT department would have to keep supporting the needs of their remote workforce. No-code platforms require minimum participation by the IT staff in the SharePoint application development, customization, and automation process. This helps the department to focus on new initiatives that ensure business continuity and productivity during these challenging times.

Confront your Business Challenges in the “New Normal” with Confidence

Now that you understand the importance of adopting a No-code application development platform to tackle the challenges presented by the ‘New Normal’, let us introduce you to QuickApps. It is a powerful No-code solution that allows business users to customize and build SharePoint apps at 80% faster with simple point-and-click configuration. Business users can use its powerful web apps and pre-built templates to create SharePoint applications from scratch, customize existing apps or automate tedious, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks. Furthermore, QuickApps can be leveraged to:

• Create insightful Dashboards and Charts
• Automate business reports
• Data Consolidation and Aggregation
• Create Dynamic Navigation and Dynamic Forms

This pandemic will test the resilience of organizations over the next few years. Businesses need the right technologies to tackle the unprecedented challenges posed by the ongoing situation. QuickApps for Office 365 can ensure that your employees can rapidly build and release SharePoint business applications to streamline their work, benefiting the organization in the long run. 

Take a Free QuickApps Trial Now, to see how it can help you stay ahead of the business challenges posed by the “New Normal”.

Amit Gupta

Associate Director – Product Development

Amit Gupta plays a key role in incubating and establishing best SharePoint practices at AgreeYa. He is closely associated with the Product Development and Delivery team and works to find new solutions based on Microsoft technology and optimize performance and responsiveness for our clients. He can be reached at amit.g@agreeya.com

SharePoint has grown into the most widely embraced collaboration and content management platform, encouraging smooth teamwork. Most organizations have vast dependencies on SharePoint as it has become their hub for storing the most valuable business data. And this data carries insights that help you stay ahead of the competition. When nurtured with care the data residing in SharePoint can help you make business-critical decisions and perform course corrections with optimum confidence. Let us take a scenario to explain the common practices in business reports preparation from SharePoint data.

Douglas is the Sales head of his organization. He has been asked by the management to justify his sales team’s value and budget. He needs to present an impactful sales report to the management within a few days. A lot depends on this report. Douglas can use any of the below-mentioned processes to prepare the report.   

Option #1: Manual Creation of Report

9 out of every 10 SharePoint users would create reports using this tedious, repetitive, and needlessly complicated process. You would copy and paste data from a SharePoint list into an Excel sheet. Anyone who has used this process knows how tedious and time-consuming this ritual can be. While copy-pasting the information is only the first part, you still need to arrange and group the data. Finally, the data needs to be represented in an impactful manner using graphs. There are high chances of errors and your report might not be able to meet the standards expected by the management.

Option #2: IT Intervention

Fearing failure, some non-professional SharePoint users might turn to the IT department for help. The plan is: the IT would create a custom coded app fit for the purpose. However, the problem is that the IT department is already overburdened with its commitments and struggles to meet this additional task. As a result, you can expect a protracted wait period. Not an ideal scenario when you need to prepare the report within the next few days, right? Such a process can support only the long-term vision and not tasks that need quick turnarounds.

Option #3: No-Code Customization Solution

This is the simplest and quickest way to create reports and dashboards. A No-Code SharePoint customization solution empowers SharePoint business users to create custom apps without any coding and in rapid time. You can add features to the app using the point and click configuration. QuickApps is the best example of such a solution.

Build impactful business reports with QuickApps   

Logically Douglas uses powerful web apps of QuickApps to complete the task at hand. He utilizes qListView web app to create a dashboard by combining data from multiple lists (even across sites), site collections, and web applications. Once completed, he unleashes the qChartView web app to represent the information in compelling 3D charts. QuickApps allows Douglas to complete the task with precision in a few hours as opposed to days. 

Furthermore, QuickApps can be used by the SharePoint On-Premise and SharePoint Online business users alike to:  

• Create insightful Dashboards & Charts
• Automate business reports
• Data Consolidation and Aggregation
• Create Dynamic Navigation and Dynamic Forms

Take a Free QuickApps Trial Now, to see how it can help you prepare impactful business reports with SharePoint data. 

Amit Gupta

Associate Director – Product Development

Amit Gupta plays a key role in incubating and establishing best SharePoint practices at AgreeYa. He is closely associated with the Product Development and Delivery team and works to find new solutions based on Microsoft technology and optimize performance and responsiveness for our clients. He can be reached at amit.g@agreeya.com

Until a decade back, organizations wanting to create a customized SharePoint application to meet their business needs would have only one option available to them – hire a SharePoint developer or an external agency to build the application for them. In both cases, it is a costly proposition for organizations to get the job done.

However, with the introduction of low-code and no-code SharePoint application development platforms, organizations started saving time and effort on custom application development. Additionally, these new applications also enable faster application development and that too at a much lower cost. Low-Code and No-Code solutions are usually provided to customers in a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering so that users do not have to worry about setting up the infrastructure and development environments needed to support their applications. 

Low-Code and No-Code SharePoint application development platforms have quickly gained popularity among the organizations seeking to rapidly customize and add new capabilities in SharePoint. This was because organizations no longer had to deal with issues like increasingly mobile workforce and the troubles of finding competent SharePoint developers (don’t forget the cost involved). Let us spend some time understanding a No-Code development platform and how are they different from Low-code development platforms.

No-code development platform, popularly known as NCDPs, empowers programmers, and non-programmers to create applications through graphical user interfaces and configuration instead of traditional computer programming or coding. No-code development platforms (NCDPs) are closely related to low-code development platforms. This is because both are designed with a common objective to accelerate and simplify the application development process.

At a first glimpse, it is very easy to confuse between low-code and no-code because they sound so similar phonetically and literally. According to Gartner, “no-code” application platforms are part of the low-code sphere, taking them together into its latest Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms, 2019 (LCAP).

Let us take a deeper dive into understanding the difference and properties of Low-Code and No-Code platforms.

We can define a true no-code platform as one that helps in creating software without coding. Meaning your business applications can be developed without writing a single line of code or requiring any programming. These platforms provide a visual software interface that allows the user to create the application with easy-to-use features such as:

• Drag-drop and Point and click modules
• Picklist selection boxes
• Spreadsheet imports, etc.

A low-code platform functions in a similar fashion to a no-code platform with a visual Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and similar ease of use, however, they tend to be more general-purpose in nature than most no-code platforms.

The difference between a No-Code and a Low-Code development platforms gets blurred depending on the platform’s full set of functionalities. However, several key distinctions set apart No-Code from Low-Code.

• App Creator – No-Code platforms can be used by any business user with an understanding of SharePoint whereas Low-Code platforms require Power users with coding language knowledge who can work within a platform’s constraints to streamline the application development process.
• Core Design – No-Code platforms function as per the driven model, where the end-user commands an app’s design through drag and drop manipulation, point and click, or simple logic. Low-Code platforms often employ a similar development model with a greater dependence on hard code for controlling an application’s core architecture.
• User Interface – No-Code platforms mostly rely on a present User Interfacelayer which simplifies and streamlines an app’s design. On the other hand, a Low-Code platform may provide greater flexibility in UI options at the cost of additional coding requirements.

Additionally, No-Code solutions are primarily built for citizen developers. Citizen developers are those who may not know, nor do they need to know, any actual programming languages to use the No-Code platform. One such product is QuickApps, an innovative No-code SharePoint customization, and development platform.

As a No-Code development platform, QuickApps helps the business users to develop custom applications very easily and rapidly without coding, using a simple point and click configuration. QuickApps is available for both SharePoint On-Premise and Microsoft Office 365. This state-of-the-art platform includes multiple pre-built templates and powerful web-apps for SharePoint On-premise and  Microsoft Office 365

By adopting QuickApps, businesses can have many benefits like decreased application lifecycle time, saving in cost and effort required in supporting, maintaining, and upgrading business applications ensuring their long-term impact and high return on investment.

The top benefits of using QuickApps are shared below

Faster Custom Application Development – QuickApps offers point-and-click configuration instead of custom coding to customize SharePoint. This makes the application development process up to 80 percent faster.

Fast Track Time to Deliver – QuickApps’ point-and-click configuration consumes significantly less time as compared to writing, debugging, and compiling codes. Functionalities can be developed and delivered quickly. This helps enterprises meet their development SLAs.

Empower SharePoint Users – Empower your non-technical SharePoint users to develop customized applications easily and safely without any risk to the environment.

Cost – Saving – A No-Code platform like QuickApps makes it easy for any SharePoint users to develop apps on their own thereby releasing costly SharePoint development resources for more important projects.

Improve User Experience – Improve your users’ experience with impactful dashboards and charts easily developed using QuickApps Web Apps. Users can enjoy apps that fit the business needs, along with improved navigation, enhanced UI, and drive high user adoptions.

For more QuickApps information and free trial visit http://quickapps.staging.agreeya.com or write to us at quickapps@agreeya.com

.

Amit Gupta

Associate Director – Product Development

Amit Gupta plays a key role in incubating and establishing best SharePoint practices at AgreeYa. He is closely associated with the Product Development and Delivery team and works to find new solutions based on Microsoft technology and optimize performance and responsiveness for our clients. He can be reached at amit.g@agreeya.com

Business process automation has become a strategic enabler of business agility for present-day organizations. It is quickly becoming an essential tool to have in the CIO’s kitty bag. Automation helps organizations dealing with various interrelated processes to unify and streamline their day to day work. Right automation tools can help businesses significantly decrease operational costs and increase employee productivity.  In this blog, we will discuss the benefits and other essentials of SharePoint business process automation. Let’s begin.

Signs that you need automation

• Employees are spending a lot of time in executing repetitive tasks.
• Lack of a streamlined approach is leading to employee frustrations
• Human errors are leading to disruption of business processes or downtime.
• Risks of compliance breaches due to a lack of visibility into business processes and data.

Benefits of SharePoint Business Automation

SharePoint is the first platform that comes to mind when thinking about enterprise content or document management, among other things. For organizations using SharePoint as their sole document and content management hub, it is essential to keep their data well organized and ready for use. This can be achieved through process automation. Some of the major benefits of automation on SharePoint are:

#1: Increased Productivity

The automation of SharePoint business processes reduces the time needed to complete any task. This can enhance productivity rates for routine tasks, with the side benefits of freeing up employees’ time. Employees can use this saved time to concentrate on other complex and revenue-generating activities.

#2: Time and Cost Reduction

Manual tasks, essentially need to be performed one at a time and at a much slower pace than the automated tasks, leading to extra costs. Automation allows organizations to accomplish the tasks utilizing few resources and at a much lesser time.

#3: Streamlined Communication

When employees try to pass on information through emails or conversations, there is a high probability of certain relevant details getting lost in translation. An automated system serves as a centralized platform for employees to access and find the information required for the successful completion of their tasks. Updates and documentation are recorded and managed so that all the information remains current. Controls remain in place to prevent overlaying of information and for role-specific access.

#4: Improved Quality

Process automation ensures that all the actions are performed identically, leaving no room for error. Each task needs to be performed in a certain manner, without any deviations. This results in a better quality of work and removes the chances of manual errors.

#5: Better Visibility

Automation systems, such as dashboards, allow employees to view and monitor where things are standing at any given moment. This helps them manage deadlines efficiently and tweaking plans accordingly.

#6: Metric Visibility

Modern businesses need to constantly monitor, evaluate and monitor their business strategies if they are to gain a competitive advantage in the industry. All of these are dependent on timely access to accurate business-critical data. The automated business reports can provide the key insights required by an organization to stay ahead of their competition.

#7: Better Governance & More Reliability

Consistency is the benchmark of automated business processes, allowing organizations to offer reliable processes to customers and maintain a competitive advantage in the market. The reliability of automated processes ensures that SharePoint governance issues are executed 100% of the time and in accordance with the compliance regulations.

Automate your business process with QuickApps

QuickApps with its set of powerful web apps and pre-built templates allows SharePoint users to automate various tasks by developing apps they need. The SharePoint power users can leverage QuickApps to:

• Create insightful Dashboards & Charts
• Automate business reports
• Data Consolidation and Aggregation
• Create Dynamic Navigation and Dynamic Forms

For free trial to watch, QuickApps and QuickApps for 365 in action

Amit Gupta

Associate Director – Product Development

Amit Gupta plays a key role in incubating and establishing best SharePoint practices at AgreeYa. He is closely associated with the Product Development and Delivery team and works to find new solutions based on Microsoft technology and optimize performance and responsiveness for our clients. He can be reached at amit.g@agreeya.com