GW Apps

AWS Honeycode is Shutting Down: What Should I do?

Richard Knight — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 19:37:29 +0000

In a surprising turn of events, AWS has announced the shutdown of its no-code app builder, Honeycode, effective February 29, 2024. This sudden decision has left users wondering about the next steps and searching for a suitable alternative. In this blog post, we’ll guide you through the necessary migration steps and introduce you to a powerful alternative – GW Apps.

Migrating Away From Honeycode

There are three key steps to migrating off of Honeycode. Your plans could include more steps than this, but these three will always be the key steps.

Step 1: Secure Your Data

First up, before you even start considering Honeycode alternatives, make sure to download any useful data you stored in Honeycode. AWS has officially announced that all data will be deleted on April 30, 2024, so there’s still time, but not that much!

To export your data, use the “Export Data” option under your workbook settings. Honeycode will then provide you with CSV files containing your data. (Visit the Honeycode user community for detailed instructions.)

Step 2: Explore Honeycode Alternatives

There are many proven No-Code alternatives to Honeycode on the market. GW Apps’ outstanding combination of an extensive feature set, ease of use, and excellent value for money make it a compelling replacement for Honeycode.

Below are a few of the advantages of moving to GW Apps:

Fully No-Code Development
While Honeycode advertised itself as No-Code, building apps almost always requires expression formula programming to complete, while GW Apps is always fully No-Code.

Form building and Workflow
Honeycode doesn’t include a proper workflow builder. You can create status fields, and different layouts of a form and navigate between them, but there is no traditional workflow capability. GW Apps has a full-featured workflow builder, enabling you to model almost any business approval or review process, and automate manual actions. GW Apps also has more form features and controls, allowing you to build even more capable apps.

No Data Limits
Honeycode apps are restricted to only 10,000 rows/records, while GW Apps scales effortlessly. With GW Apps clients managing hundreds of thousands of records in a single app, data limitations can be a thing of the past.

Enhanced Security
GW Apps not only makes sharing apps easy, it also provides customized user roles and robust control over access capabilities. Set permissions to create tailored user experiences and secure business processes.

Affordability was a key feature of Honeycode, and GW Apps has a similar approach. It is one of the most competitively priced No-Code platforms on the market, offering multiple pricing plans for small, medium and enterprise customers

Step 3: Migrate to the New Platform

The final step is to build your apps on the new platform and migrate your data, so you can keep your business processes moving.

GW Apps can help simplify the migration process with the ability to import CSV files. GW Apps can even use your data schema to create forms and summary views automatically as it imports the data, jump-starting your app building.

Explore further by requesting a demo or starting a free trial of GW Apps:

The post AWS Honeycode is Shutting Down: What Should I do? appeared first on GW Apps.

Add Google Calendar Integration to your No-Code Apps

Richard Knight — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 20:59:14 +0000

Richard Knight

Chief Product Officer, GW Apps

In this article we will look at how Collegiate School harnessed the workflow capabilities of GW Apps no-code application development platform to build a custom event management solution. Then, they added seamless Google Calendar integration to the application using Make.com’s automation platform.

Collegiate School is an independent K-12 school for boys in New York City, with a campus on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The school holds many special events for school functions, admissions events, Parent Association groups, and external groups on its campus. These events require multiple levels of approvals to ensure that events do not interfere with normal school programs, or each other, and that school resources are not overburdened with the extra work required to support them. Additionally, once approved, coordination among multiple departments such as facilities, food service, and technology is required to prepare for and execute events.

The school has long understood the value of using custom solutions to help manage its events, as the required process is very specific and off-the-shelf systems found it hard to mirror that process successfully. Its prior system, built on WordPress and hosted internally by the school’s IT department, was difficult for end users to use and hard to maintain and modify, while also presenting a cybersecurity risk requiring substantial resources to mitigate. Collegiate School looked for a new platform on which to build a better event management system, as well as other workflow-oriented applications. The school focused on looking for flexibility, security, workflow capabilities and ease of development. They finally selected the GW Apps no-code platform, which had the added benefit of being particularly cost-effective.

The Event Management App

In building its new Event Management app in GW Apps, Ben Schworm, Director of Information Technology at Collegiate School, told us they wanted to add integration with Google Calendar in two main ways:

Once an event is approved in the Event Management app, it must be added to the appropriate room resource calendar in Google Calendar. It must also be updated with any subsequent changes made to the event record.
Events added directly to room resource calendars in Google must trigger the creation and approval of an event record within the Event Management app in GW Apps.

Collegiate School uses Make.com for the integration with Google Calendar. You could also use a number of other automation platforms, such as: Zapier, Tray.io, Workato, Integrately, etc. This integration saves time and reduces errors compared to having requesters or administrative staff manage events in two systems manually. It also helps Collegiate avoid potential room scheduling conflicts in heavily used, high profile spaces such as dining rooms, auditorium and gyms, by keeping all stakeholders in the loop though a formal approval process when one of these spaces is added to an event in Google Calendar.

How-To

For those of you interested in trying something similar, here a few pro-tips from Ben:

Tips for Creating and Updating the Google Calendar Events

When writing new events to Google Calendar, grab the event ID returned by Make’s ‘Google Calendar – Create Event’ module, and write it to a field in the GW Apps event record. This allows you to easily find that specific Google calendar event again, for future updates (changes & deletes).

Use Make’s ‘Tools’ module and the built-in date and time functions to parse and format the date, start time, and end time from the GWApps record and store them in variables for use in the start and end date fields within the ‘Google Calendar – Create Event’ module.
Consider copying the record ID, updated time (last modified time), and any other identifying information from the GWApps event record into the Google Calendar event.
Use a dedicated Google account, which has full access to the resource calendars, to add Google Calendar entries.
If you are working with resource calendars, create a GWApps form to store resource calendar information, such as the resource calendar email address, that you’ll need to create an event.

Tips for Updating GW Apps Records from Google Calendar Activity

If you are watching a Google Calendar and creating new GW Apps event record when a new calendar event is seen, ensure that you have a mechanism to filter out events created by GW Apps to avoid “reflection” entries in GWApps (where events created in GW Apps create an event in Google Calendar, which then triggers the creation of a new GW Apps record). There are a few ways to do this. I use a dedicated Google account when creating events in Google Calendar from GWApps form entries. The scenario (name for an automation bot in Make) that watches Google Calendar is then configured to filter out any event created by that account.
If any Google Calendars for your rooms have existing, historic events that you don’t want to be added as new event records in GWApps, the Make ‘Google Calendar – Watch Events’ module must be configured to start at a specific date. Right-click on the module and select “Choose where to start” to set the date.
I have users who “own” rooms and don’t need their event requests for those rooms to go through the full approval process. To allow for this I created Room records that store users who may bypass particular workflow/approval stages when creating an event in that room. I then created a Make scenario that checks this information to set the required workflow stage for the new event record. So, if the user adds events that include a room calendar directly in Google Calendar (ex. a user adding an event in a room they “own”) they’ll start in a later approval stage or just go directly to approved status. This process is on the more complex side and led me to use webhooks within Make to call a scenario from within another scenario. This keeps your Make “code” DRY (modular) so it’s easier to maintain moving forward.
Consider the security of your GWApps environment when setting up your Make scenarios. GWApps gives you the ability to limit what your API endpoints can do in your app by user, form, and operation (view, create, update, delete, etc). Create different API keys for different levels of access. Also, be careful to limit the exposure of your GWApps API keys and associated credential information within the Make platform. I store it outside the Make.com platform and use a dedicated scenario to manage token retrieval from GWApps, with the “Data is confidential” setting enabled in the scenario, keeping API credentials from being logged at every scenario run. This is not bulletproof security, but it does limit your exposure to an extent. Needless to say, your Make.com environment should also have two-factor authentication turned on.

The post Add Google Calendar Integration to your No-Code Apps appeared first on GW Apps.

No-Code Training Workshop October 25th, 2022

Jake Caldwell — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 23:06:07 +0000

Benefits of No-Code Workshop Bootcamp

We believe companies are better off when their staff have a solid understanding of No-Code platforms. At the end of this bootcamp, you have the option to continue building apps on GW Apps or evaluate other No-Code platforms and determine the solutions that are best for you.

Bootcamp Schedule

The Bootcamp will consist of 4 two-hour sessions, beginning on July 27th.

Session 1 – October 25th: Platform Overview – Designing your forms.
Session 2 – October 27th: Adding workflow, data security and building reports.
Session 3 – Start Building your own App.
Session 4 (Private session) – Complete your App. Production Launch.
*sessions 3 & 4 training dates will be determined with attendees.

Program Details

Agencies nominate 1 or 2 employees to attend this program.
GW Apps will host a series of workshops to help participants build sample apps, then a production app for their company.
Free GW Apps license for 60 days.
Weekly office hours to provide support after workshops.

The post No-Code Training Workshop October 25th, 2022 appeared first on GW Apps.

Webinar October 18, 2022: Building a Modern Self-Service Portal

Jake Caldwell — Thu, 06 Oct 2022 23:19:00 +0000

Building a Modern Self-Service Portal

A self-service employee portal is the most efficient way for your teams to request IT and business management services:

Make requesting IT and business services easier
Speed up approvals and completion of service requests
Reduce Operational Cost

GW Apps enables you to rapidly digitize your forms, build advanced workflow services to accommodate multiple levels of approvals, send custom notification and status updates, generate management reports to track performance and SLAs. All the elements required for a successful employee self service portal.

In this webinar, we’ll show you what it takes to rapidly build and deploy your employee self service portal.

Webinar Schedule

Date: Tuesday, October 18, 2022
Time: 10:00-10:30 AM PT // 1:00-1:30 PM ET
Invite your colleagues

The post Webinar October 18, 2022: Building a Modern Self-Service Portal appeared first on GW Apps.

Helping Businesses Build Web Applications Faster and at Reasonable Prices

Jake Caldwell — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 19:02:08 +0000

Our CEO was recently interviewed by TheAdReview about how our company innovates and the solutions we provide to our customers.

First of all, how are you and your team doing in these COVID-19 times?

We’re doing well. Most of our team members are young and managed to avoid getting COVID or overcame it rather quickly. We already worked as a distributed team, and were adept at collaborating in the cloud from a business perspective, so the adjustment was fairly easy. Most of our clients are based in other states or countries, and collaborating online is second nature.

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded or joined this company?

My partner and I founded GW Apps 3 years ago. Previously we worked together at an IT Professional firm helping businesses migrate their legacy applications to the cloud. It is a time-consuming effort with a lot of repeatable tasks. We saw an opportunity to leverage modern cloud-based tools and offer a similar service at a much lower cost. So we embarked on a mission to make it easier and more affordable to build web applications.

How does your company innovate?

GW Apps enables small and medium-sized businesses to build web applications leveraging No-Code technologies and save up to 80% of the costs in the process: All without having to write a single line of code. With GW Apps, you can build smart forms, easily add logic and workflow, trigger automation, deliver custom reports, and share data between applications, all on a single platform.

How the Coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you Coping?

Our business is global, and 95%+ of our clients connect with us virtually. A third of our staff is also based overseas. So we are used to working virtually. From an operational perspective, there have not been many changes. Probably the opposite, as our clients have all upped their games and learned to work virtually, making it even easier to collaborate and support them. There was some slowdown at the beginning of the pandemic, as a few clients canceled or delayed projects due to uncertainty in their business. But business stabilized after a few months and picked it up again. Customers want to accelerate their digital transformation and look at more efficient ways to build web applications to manage their business better.

What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis?

We were already operating in the cloud, as we are a Google Business partner, and are leveraging the full range of Google technologies. Our team also works with the other leading cloud vendors, Microsoft and AWS. Our proprietary solution helps customers extend their investment in cloud-based collaboration platforms and build custom solutions to modernize their operations. Since 95% of our customers are located in other states or countries, a third of our staff lives in Latin America and Africa. This is the new business model. We’re blessed with all the innovations that vendors bring to the market to make this possible.

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

We operate in a hot space, growing at 45% yearly but with many players. But No-Code is a very segmented market. Many vendors focus on team collaboration (Airtable) or transform spreadsheets into web apps (Appsheet). Others are great for building mobile apps. We found our sweet spot addressing the needs of SMB who need to automate their business workflow processes and build self-service forms that are coupled with a higher degree of workflow automation.

Your Final Thoughts

We’re blessed to be in the business of helping SMB digitize their operations. Large enterprises have many choices, but they come at a high price. We offer similar solutions at affordable prices. This segment has been neglected, and we are very excited to deliver these solutions to our SMB clients. Although we have learned to work and operate from anywhere, I think there is great value in meeting at the workplace from time to time. I miss the bond and camaraderie that we get when we interact in person and hope that we’ll reach a high level of protection and comfort to resume some form of working on-site soon.

The post Helping Businesses Build Web Applications Faster and at Reasonable Prices appeared first on GW Apps.