Nsite Launches No-Coding Development Environment

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) company Nsite, which has historically offered products that extend customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, will launch Tuesday a browser-based development environment that lets users build new applications.

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) and open-source technologies, such as LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, P for PHP, Perl and Python), enables the drag-and-drop development environment in the browser. There's no coding required; nor plug-ins or downloads.

Nsite also built in a "Web-services Wizard" that integrates with both Salesforce.com and Siebel CRM "in about one minute with no coding," said Rosie Hausler, Nsite vice president of marketing. "A guy on my marketing staff, a non-programmer, built an HR application in about 20 hours."

Hausler said the prior Nsite version offered the Web-services Wizard, but users could only pull data from Salesforce.com, but couldn't push data back in. "You could build a Web-services Wizard into Salesforce.com that can both push and pull data back and forth," she said.

Nsite 6.0 introduces enterprise objects, pieces of code that are reusable, as well as data links and workflow capabilities to help build more advanced enterprise application.Building applications in the browser without learning a programming language provides more options for businesses with less than 1,000 employees that have tighter budgets, said Laurie McCabe, vice president for SMB solutions at AMI Partners. "The application is pretty innovative," she said.

If a downside exists, know the product's limitations, McCabe said, suggesting that potential customers take Nsite up on the company's try-before-you-buy offer before shelling out $40 per user per month.

Along with the Nsite 6.0 development platform the company calls The Nsite Application Builder, Nsite will introduce The Nsite Application Center. The out-of-the-box products include channel, quote and proposal management applications to give companies immediate visibility into inventory, quoting, and management cycles. Among the features in Nsite 6.0 Application Builder, dynamic enterprise objects framework allows users to create and reuse objects to meet any business requirement, dynamic page layout with user-interface pages generated through drag-and-drop functions, out-of-the-box Web services integration to Salesforce.com and Oracle Corp.'s Siebel CRM platforms.

The application also offers analytics with dashboards and reports providing actionable metrics and personalized real time views into data, workflow for predictive routing and process controls, application lifecycle management for full testing and versioning control, and role-based features. Nsite, based in Pleasanton, Calif., claims more than 10,000 users at 80 companies in 22 countries.