In our previous two blog posts about the new release 6.0, we already gave you a small foretaste of the exciting new features. Our CTO Christian Kleinschroth now presents three highlights in more detail and shows in advance how they will look in the Simplifier update on January 31, 2021.
(Reading time: approx. 4 min.)
According to a recent study by the digital association Bitkom, around 86,000 positions for IT specialists are currently unfilled, which means that most IT departments in companies are hugely overburdened with the emerging digitization requirements. Therefore, it is becoming increasingly important to involve employees from the specialist departments, where in fact there is process expertise, to drive forward the digital transformation in companies and to enable them to support the creation of digital solutions with the help of low-code development tools. Both Forrester and Gartner market analysts predict enormous potential for these so-called citizen developers in helping to shape the digital transformation. This is because the use of a low-code platform can at least partially counteract the usually limited resources available within corporate IT, insofar as the empowerment of citizen development teams to use such a platform also succeeds.
To support this trend and enable application development to be even easier for low- and no-coders, Simplifier has been working intensively on the new release over the past six months. CTO Christian Kleinschroth presents the most important power features of Release 6.0 in this blog post.
What highlights can be expected?
The fresh, new design, intelligent wizards and the Simplifier Marketplace are particularly noteworthy: According to Christian Kleinschroth, the focus of the 6.0 release was in every respect on optimizing the user-friendliness of the platform. With the new power features, Simplifier gives companies an optimal tool to build up a strategic citizen development and support it during implementation.
A new look and feel for better usability
To accelerate the process from app idea to finished implementation for existing users and first-time users, the look and feel of the Simplifier platform has changed significantly in Release 6.0:
In the new dashboard, all essential functions can be found at a glance, and it looks more streamlined and cleaned up overall. The side bar menu lists the key functions, making it easy to create new applications, connectors or business objects. In addition, the dashboard has added new community elements, such as the marketplace, release notes or the community forum. Splitting applications into “projects” to which specific content can be assigned also provides better overview.
The focus on usability is also evident in the redesigned Widget Groups view. More than 50 ready-made design elements (widget groups) are represented in the new release in the form of icons. This means that users can immediately find out which elements are to be used for their mockup and they can integrate them directly into their screen design by drag & drop.
The Process Designer also has a fresh new look, allowing processes to be read even more easily. However, it’s not just the look and feel that has been improved, but also the performance: the loading times of the processes have been significantly reduced, increasing performance by a whopping 80 percent with the new release.
At the end of the day, an app design also requires test data, so we’ve added a DB editor to the database (DB) designer. So once a user has created or imported a database, it is now possible to create new test data or modify existing data.
Intelligent support thanks to app assistants
Artificial intelligence (AI) will enable applications to be created largely automatically in the future – without a developer having to intervene or to code. Simplifier Release 6.0 also contains preliminary AI approaches in form of the new wizards. These guide the user step by step through the individual processes of app development. According to Christian Kleinschroth, Citizen Developers or Simplifier beginners can use them to create a completely finished application in less than five minutes. In addition, the intelligent “little helpers” also offer considerable time savings for pro coders, who can thus quickly familiarize with the platform and comfortably build applications based on databases.
Synergy effects in the new Marketplace
Release 6.0 also features a completely new menu item: the Simplifier Marketplace. Here, numerous app templates and ‘ready-to-use’ connectors will soon be found – for the time being, the Marketplace offers access to SAP connectors as well as connectors to the Microsoft and Google universe. These can be imported and used in Simplifier via download. Currently, the majority of low-code based applications are still developed and provided by the IT department. By having access to pre-built templates, pro coders save significant time, which benefits agile software development.
But Citizen Developers can also take advantage of synergy effects to make application development even easier. In addition, detailed documentation is available on the Simplifier community page for many Marketplace contents. The Marketplace is a power feature in Release 6.0, which will be enriched bit by bit with new templates with the help of the Simplifier partners and the community.
But that is not all by any means
In addition to the features mentioned above, several other functions have been integrated and existing ones have been improved in Release 6.0. You can find more details about this in our Release Notes starting January 31, 2021.
Just wait a few more days and the new release will go live. We will inform you officially as soon as you can work on the new version.
The Simplifier Team
