Why?

Because they help companies improve operational efficiency, user experience and, ultimately, customer satisfaction. In other words, workflows are crucial for a company to remain competitive and relevant.

At first glance, it might not seem all that exciting, but the reason this is one of our favorite features is that there are no separate steps to modeling and implementing business processes: it’s all built simply with drag-and-drop technology.

This is very easy and quick to change. But as they say – a picture is worth a thousand words. And with OutSystems we can do it visually.

The OutSystems platform also has built-in features and automation that significantly reduce the normally time-consuming effort of integrating with Databases, other systems and software, such as integration with SOAP web services, REST APIs and embedded SAP systems.

As a result, we can integrate faster, transfer knowledge, leverage reusable integrations, monitor integrations with logging and performance management, and manage configurations easily with the central consoles provided by the platform.

OutSystems has native support for SOAP and REST web services, SAP systems and external database systems. For these systems, the programmer only needs to configure the link or URL, and the OutSystems platform generates everything necessary to use in the applications.

Nowadays, it doesn’t matter if we are building a B2C or B2B application; all we need is an intuitive and seamless UX. Let’s be honest, programmers aren’t known for being design sensitive – no offense. And when there is pressure to provide a faster solution, the result often leads to subpar UX.

One of the best things about the OutSystems platform is that you don’t need to be an expert in UX and UI to create beautiful applications quickly. With OutSystems, we can create from scratch, customize pre-built templates, or import existing templates, ensuring a good application image, as well as application performance.

In other words, one of the many benefits of OutSystems is that the platform provides the building blocks to deliver these experiences faster. We have ready access to UI patterns and predefined page templates with layouts, widgets, components, styles and logic that we can add to our applications using a type of: What you see is what you get.

OutSystems lets you build powerful applications without being limited by technology or losing control of your code. It allows you to develop very complex applications, no matter how complex they are. OutSystems is used even for the latest technologies such as Reactive, AI/ML, IoT, RPA or microservices.

With OutSystems, Low-Code means no limits. We can use the languages we know to add to our code and extend the platform however we want. All of this using a very pleasant visual model, avoiding more boring moments and confusing code.

There is no runtime interpreter nor proprietary data model, which allows us to have a no-lock in model. In other words, if the customer understands that they are not taking full advantage of the platform, when the contract with OutSystems ends, the applications continue to function fully and belong to them, thus not losing all the investment they have made so far, and can maintain applications.

The OutSystems platform ensures that enterprise applications are not only scalable, but also reliable, with excellent performance. Specially dedicated to building applications for large departments, core systems or digital and mobile experiences that satisfy millions of users. Scalable from pilot integration to full implementation. OutSystems is able to overcome even the most complex customer requirements with scaling, external scaling and cloud support.

It features enterprise-grade security with continuous protection and patches for newly identified code vulnerabilities that are automatically applied to all applications. It has real-time protection against DDOS (Denial of Service) attacks and other common vulnerabilities.

OutSystems also features auditing benefits, security logs and reports to better understand what is happening with your applications. It also has authentication solutions and hundreds of security validations, from the development phase to implementation and even in Production.

The implementation process

The implementation process in OutSystems and through the respective IDE is called 1- Click Publish. It performs, in a single step, all the necessary operations to ensure that all developments are published in a uniform way.

This operation is carried out in 3 steps:

• Upload: Stores a new version of the developments carried out in a given module on the server;

• Compilation: Generates and compiles the optimized ASP.NET C# code and creates the corresponding SQL scripts for the DB;

• Deploying: Updates the database and places the application on IIS.

Additionally, the OutSystems IDE has an error and warning validation system called TrueChange.

Both errors and warnings can occur at any stage of the module’s lifecycle, such as implementing some logic, creating a page, testing a query, or publishing to the server. For most errors and warnings, double-clicking the error line in the TrueChange tab takes us directly to the source of the identified issue, allowing us to take immediate action to resolve whatever is necessary for cleaner, more efficient code.

When done right, DevOps can save you a lot of time. For many years, the simple idea of testing and migrating different applications was quite complicated. Today, it’s not so much anymore.

DevOps is a culture change that has helped us accelerate the overall application lifecycle. In a world where speed matters, DevOps can be our best friend.

With OutSystems and following DevOps best practices, we are not limited to a single task. We are able to work throughout the entire life cycle of a project, from development to testing and implementation, using tools to automate processes that were previously manual and slow. This way, we can accelerate the development, implementation and maintenance of applications, allowing teams to focus on commercial value and less on the technological part.

Low-code platforms like OutSystems are excellent tools for extending the gains of Agile and DevOps. OutSystems, for example, offers the flexibility to integrate with your built-in tools while taking advantage of all the built-in DevOps capabilities. Thus, we can benefit from continuous delivery that ultimately promotes productive collaboration between business and IT.

Lifetime is one of OutSystems’ main DevOps features, which allows us to manage all the environments we have in our architecture, from DEV, Quality, Pre-production and Production environments, or others depending on the size of the architecture.

With Lifetime, it is possible to create deployment plans, which are duly validated automatically, with regard to application consistency, in order to check whether all dependencies are ok so as not to pass applications with broken references and ensure that everything is well published and functional in the target environment.

The OutSystems platform provides very complete auditing and monitoring tools that allow proactive management of application performance and facilitate the detection of performance problems, allowing them to be identified in real time.

There are, for example, performance dashboards for each of the applications and business activity dashboards where we can access the status of our workflows.

With all this, it is possible to understand performance bottlenecks and take action. The execution times of all queries, webservice invocations, page renderings or custom APIs are monitored asynchronously. These reports provide valuable information about necessary adjustments and optimizations.

All information and metrics are provided by default, without requiring extra work and without introducing any runtime overhead.

For all this, OutSystems is ranked as the #1 MXDP platform and we love working with it!