What advice do you have for others considering JAMS?

I would give Fortra's JAMS a rating of five out of ten. While the software is excellent, my experience with the company could have been better. As a result, I would not consider purchasing any other Fortra products in the future. We have two JAMS users in our organization. JAMS is a technically powerful tool, but it has a learning curve for new users. It's crucial to understand the user interface and how agents communicate with the back-end system. Before connecting JAMS to other applications, it's important to familiarize yourself with its capabilities. For example, some scripts can be executed directly within JAMS, allowing you to create jobs using JAMS' features before relying on external scripts. However, debugging failed JAMS jobs can be time-consuming due to the complexity of the logs. Once you've mastered it, JAMS functions effectively, though the licensing structure is a notable caveat. We exchange files on a nightly basis with vendors. The ability to protect the data we exchange against cybersecurity threats varies depending on the type of data being exchanged.

I rate Fortra JAMS nine out of 10. One thing to consider is how long you want to keep your files. If you're saving them for more than 30 days, you need to archive them to a different location, so you don't lose them. You want to keep the job history for more than 30 days. If you need to maintain the job history for SOC and audit purposes, you need to be aware of those things. If you don't want to expose your JAMS implementation over the Internet, you need to have a DMZ installed somewhere and establish a connection between the DMZ and JAMS that is secured from the outside world.

I would rate Fortra's JAMS nine out of ten. If the global search is added and the reporting is improved, I would rate JAMS a ten out of ten. We are planning to upgrade JAMS to the latest version this year. Next year, we may demonstrate a demo for SAP integration or other integrations that could benefit the company. If the budget permits, we will implement these integrations. While many integrations are possible, we currently do not utilize any. We currently use code-driven automation only limitedly and are evaluating its potential. As we utilize JAMS version 7.1.407, an older version compared to the available 7.5, we are exploring demos to determine the best fit for our future needs based on our current system. I maintain JAMS for our organization.

The solution has positively impacted productivity. The ability to able to automate manual tasks and being able to check on file transfers, et cetera, has been great. It helps tremendously. Right now, we're using version 6 of the solution; however, we're actively talking about getting version 7 this summer. I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

I rely on JAMS to help me identify and address common issues that may prevent jobs from running smoothly. I typically start by checking their support site and documentation for solutions. If I can't find a solution, I search for existing tickets or create one myself. It would be beneficial if JAMS provided a community forum where users could share and resolve issues together, enhancing support for all customers. Agents are crucial for our organization as they enable us to scale and balance processes across multiple servers. They effectively bridge the gap between structured batch automation and tasks happening on desktops and web browsers. However, we encountered an issue with a specific server's agent, which was initially challenging to diagnose. While JAMS eventually identified the problem as a database issue, there was some initial uncertainty about the cause. Overall, while agents are valuable, there can be challenges in fully understanding and addressing issues related to them. JAMS handles exceptions effectively, but it requires users to have programming knowledge to implement them. It is not a no-code or low-code product, so users need to understand programming languages to utilize its full capabilities. Simplifying this aspect could make it more accessible and user-friendly. Centralizing job management across all platforms and applications is highly important to our organization. It ensures that schedules and processes are properly handled, which is critical for both our customers and the public, especially for public-facing processes. Effective management reduces the risk of errors and enhances accountability for all stakeholders. JAMS's code-driven automation is beneficial for handling complex scheduling requirements. While the website documentation may not cover all scenarios, support tickets allow engineers to assist. However, the quality of the response can vary based on the engineer's experience, leading to different levels of resolution. JAMS saves us a significant amount of time when troubleshooting stalled jobs. JAMS has helped us eliminate the need for monitoring tools like AutoMate. AutoMate was a simpler tool we used in the past, but JAMS provided more advanced features and functionality. JAMS has helped free up our IT staff's time by automating tasks, which reduces the need for manual QA and troubleshooting efforts. Before purchasing JAMS, new users should consider the scale of their operations, including the number of jobs, servers, and agents needed. Understanding these factors will help determine the budget and ensure the system meets their requirements. Overall, I would rate Fortra's JAMS as a nine out of ten.

I rate Fortra JAMS nine out of 10. We recommend JAMS to all our existing clients. We have 10 to 15 GoAnywhere MFT users, but by the year's end, I expect to demo JAMS to at least half of our current base so they can see how powerful this solution is. They can have GoAnywhere for their file transfers and JAMS for their workflow automation. Our GoAnywhere MFT clients need to automate commands, batch file transfers, and PowerShell scripts. JAMS gives you better insights and more options than natively executing commands in Azure MFT.

I would rate Fortra's JAMS eight out of ten. We have three JAMS users in our organization and over 50 in our client's organizations. I particularly recommend JAMS to our clients in the financial industry. It offers valuable features for monitoring job execution, receiving error notifications, and integrating seamlessly with other applications.

I would rate Fortra's JAMS nine out of ten. Five people are using JAMS in our organization. Fortra's JAMS is a great cost-effective solution for automating daily tasks, such as rebooting a server, running PowerShell commands, executing SQL queries, and generating SQL statements. It can do virtually anything.

I give Fortra's JAMS a nine out of ten. There are 50 users in our system, but only my team has administrative privileges. This means that while all users can access the JAMS client and run, release, or cancel their jobs, they cannot delete or modify anything. The remaining 46 users are simply managing their own jobs, whereas my team of four has the ability to modify settings. I used Fortra's JAMS successfully across a variety of jobs and it is highly recommended. The solution saved me a significant amount of money, time, and effort through effective monitoring and other features. Overall, I believe Fortra's JAMS is a great product that can benefit many people. I have come to understand the importance of centralizing management within our organization for the benefit of both the company and its employees. This facilitates prompt troubleshooting and efficient communication of notifications.

We had two internal people who evaluated it and installed it in staging and production. They learned it on their own. When I joined the company, I didn't have any prior experience with JAMS, so they gave me training, and I learned from them. The main challenge was that while learning the platform and its functionalities, we were also doing onboarding. We were migrating different jobs to JAMS, and we encountered some issues. For example, while migrating the jobs, we had to disable them because there was another phase of the project for communicating with the product team and identifying the jobs that needed to be enabled and the jobs that weren't needed anymore. So, we encountered different challenges while importing the jobs, configuring the jobs, and assigning the access permissions, but from that experience, we learned a lot. Overall, it was a good experience. I'd rate JAMS a 10 out of 10 for its features and capabilities. In terms of features, JAMS has almost all features. JAMS can meet the needs of most companies or organizations at the moment. We don't find any limitations.

I rate Fortra's JAMS an eight out of ten.

I rate Fortra's JAMS a ten out of ten.

We have five hands-on users of JAMS including two admins and three operators who monitor and release jobs on an as-needed basis. The admins are the ones involved in maintenance, not that they're necessarily needed for maintenance, but they are the ones capable of doing whatever needs to be done. I would definitely recommend it. Note that there is a learning curve, so you should go in with a plan. But it is highly flexible and very valuable.

I rate the solution ten out of ten. JAMS eliminated virtually all our other monitoring tools, as 99.9% of what we do is with the solution. We do a few minor tasks in Linux for crime jobs, and we have to use Task Scheduler in a few situations because we can't have centralized processing. We use JAMS 100% where we can. My advice to those evaluating the solution is to set up your server to run the jobs you need to run beforehand. Those are generally already in place if you're switching from another tool. JAMS is a very lightweight application, so you don't need a lot of processing power. Dictate a host and a failover host server, and you can build a development environment. Still, it is optional as there are decent ways of promoting code from development to production. The solution is relatively straightforward and lightweight.

We are not using JAMS much now because of the new platform, but based on the time for which we used it, I would definitely recommend it to others. We were pretty impressed with it because we were not sure how much to expect from this job scheduler. We were very happy with it. It's definitely something that we can vouch for. It's an easy-to-use tool, and it's full-featured. There are so many other features that were shown to us during the demo. We didn't use all of them, but it does come with a whole lot of features. It's very stable. Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten.

I would absolutely recommend it to anybody. If you don't give it a try, you're a fool. At least give it a try because you'll find that it's an easy install. It's an incredibly easy management tool to go around. The setup wizards are nice. It's a little slow on some of the history look-ups, and I don't know why. Other than that, it's very clean with a good front end and easy manageability. In terms of helping us to be aware of and handle common issues that can prevent our jobs from running, we haven't had anything. It will kill a job if there's a deadlock, and obviously, we get notifications if there are bad parameters in the job run, but I don't have any notifications about not running because of permissions, low resources, or anything like that. We don't have that kind of thing set up. I would easily rate it a 10 out of 10. With the stability and the support, to me, every day, it's a 10.

I have three examples of working very closely with enterprise job schedulers. If a company doesn't have an enterprise job scheduler, then JAMS is an easy choice. Really adopting the idea of using an enterprise job scheduler into your company culture is important. You need to move jobs out of all your other job schedulers and centralize them in JAMS. Don't just use it to schedule jobs on one system. Don't just use it as a Windows Task Scheduler replacement. Don't just use it for batch files. Anywhere that you see a scheduler, you can replace that scheduler with JAMS. Get a good C# developer and start making your own custom execution methods. Contact JAMS support and get your developers talking to their developers. That will help you get up to speed a lot faster. For anyone coming off of another job scheduler, like Tivoli or Tidal, I would tell them that they have made a good choice. This solution is just as powerful and much more cost-effective. Lean into it. Really use it. Don't just use it for this and that. Don't have your other systems and job schedulers doing their own things like exporting files and then relying on JAMS a file trigger to detect the presence of that file. Have the JAMS scheduler kick off the job that creates the file. Don't do it half-heartedly. I would rate it as 10 out of 10. Anytime that I am geeking out with other IT guys about their systems and processes, I always end up talking about JAMS.

I'm really excited that we're trying to upgrade to the 7.x version, because it's so much better. But it's a huge change to go from the 6.0 version to the 7.0 version. The tool looks completely different. It works differently, with different ways to do things, so there is a big learning curve. Since our developers build their own jobs in the lower-level environments, it's going to be a big learning curve for our entire company to start using the most current version. We've defined our complex scheduling scenarios the way that JAMS works in our current version, but in the future version that's going to be much easier. That version has the ability to create multiple schedules on the same job, instead of having multiple jobs with different schedules doing the same thing. In terms of the upgrade process, we have multiple instances, including development, stage, and production. We've been trying to build a test environment and we have been doing a lot of our tests there. For our actual cut-over and conversion to the newest version, we are being told that we can actually upgrade in-place, instead of having to do a conversion of our database. We're going to take a two- to three-week freeze on any scheduling updates and on adding anything new. Then we'll convert our development instance and train all of our developers on how to use it and what the differences are. We'll let them test. Then we'll upgrade our stage environment and let them test on that. As soon as all of that looks good, we'll do an upgrade of our production system. We will be working with HelpSystems on the upgrade when we get a little bit closer to it. At this point we're still trying to figure out exactly when we're going to be able to do it. But we have asked them multiple questions and gotten a lot of good feedback from them. In terms of saving time when troubleshooting stalled jobs, JAMS could do that. But we don't have all of our code set to send the output from a job back to JAMS. So in a lot of instances, we're still having to dig into the system, like Informatica, to get that log back and find out what's wrong. That is something that we, as a company, need to improve. It's not a lack of functionality on the part of JAMS.

Hi @Vincent Kwok ​and @Garth Ries,

Can you please chime in and share your experience?

There are a lot of features in JAMS that we haven't used yet. For example, there is a special calendar and we haven't even tried to utilize it. However, we would like to eventually use it to its full potential. In summary, this product is top class. I would like to commend all of the engineers and support team at JAMS, and I highly recommend it to others. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Biggest lesson learnt: It is critical having a scheduling tool that will show you where all the jobs are and what their dependencies have been when you are doing batch jobs. In the past, SQL Server Agent jobs allowed you to do it, but you really needed the ability to look at interdependencies between jobs. That is what JAMS gives you. The reason why I am giving it a seven is because of the UI. If they fix the UI, I would give a higher grade than seven.