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An easy-to-use citizen development tool

Richard Rabins

Alpha Anywhere's value as an easy-to-use citizen development tool is being recognized in the market alongside products like Microsoft PowerAppsAlpha Anywhere has long been viewed by customers as being a powerful business application development and deployment platform built for developers. Now Alpha Anywhere's value as an easy-to-use citizen development tool is being recognized in the market alongside products like Microsoft PowerApps.

A Gartner report issued 30 April, “Assessing Microsoft PowerApps as a Citizen Developer Platform,” educates technical professionals on when PowerApps is an appropriate tool for citizen developers. Gartner Research Director Kyle Davis wrote:

“PowerApps is a public-cloud-only service. Organizations seeking to deploy apps on-premises will need to consider an hpaPaaS, which offers an on-premises platform such as Alpha Software.”

Through our work with enterprise customers, Alpha Software understands that successful digital transformation requires the involvement of the whole organization -- not just IT. Experienced IT developers or line of business users (citizen developers) can only succeed at transforming the business if the product they’re using is built to serve each group separately -- around how they work and their unique skills. This is where Alpha Software shines.

Alpha Anywhere – with new TransForm technology – utilizes a declarative layout approach (vs. drag-and-drop approaches which quickly hit limits) to enable citizen developers to create and deploy mobile forms with power features like offline capability, rich media and signature capture, and GPS location.  Citizen developers can design data capture business apps in a fraction of a time with the TransForm declarative layout because the software:

  • lays out the whole app for the user
  • allows the user to easily adjust the layout to fit any business process or priorities
  • gives users the flexibility needed to ensure the mobile form looks good
  • gives users a real-time preview of what the data capture app will look like (with a WYSIWYG real-time preview).

A declarative layout approach is more flexible, has better performance and provides an improved user experience than a drag-and-drop approach which quickly encounter limits. And, as mentioned in the Gartner report on PowerApps, Alpha Software can work in the cloud, on-premise or as a combination of both.

You can view Alpha Anywhere's TransForm citizen development capability in action.

View a detailed head-to-head comparison of Alpha Anywhere vs. Microsoft PowerApps.

Further reading: 
citizen development, transform
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About Author

Richard Rabins
Richard Rabins

Co-founder of Alpha Software, Richard Rabins focuses on strategy, sales, and marketing. Richard also served as CEO of SoftQuad International from 1997 to 2001, when it owned Alpha. In addition to his 30 years with the company, Richard played a key role as co-founder, and served as president and chairman of the Massachusetts Software Council (now the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council), the largest technology trade organization in Massachusetts. Prior to founding Alpha, Richard was a project leader and consultant with Information Resources, Inc. (IRI), and a management consultant with Management Decision Systems, Inc. Richard holds a master's degree in system dynamics from the Sloan School at MIT, and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and master's degree in control engineering from University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has served on the boards of Silent Systems, Legacy Technology and O3B Networks, and is co-founder of Tubifi www.tubifi.com.

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The Alpha platform is the only unified mobile and web app development and deployment environment with distinct “no-code” and “low-code” components. Using the Alpha TransForm no-code product, business users and developers can take full advantage of all the capabilities of the smartphone to turn any form into a mobile app in minutes, and power users can add advanced app functionality with Alpha TransForm's built-in programming language. IT developers can use the Alpha Anywhere low-code environment to develop complex web or mobile business apps from scratch, integrate data with existing systems of record and workflows (including data collected via Alpha TransForm), and add additional security or authentication requirements to protect corporate data.

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