Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite vs. VisualCron

Agiloft is most suited to meeting the needs of an organization that requires rapid and frequent process changes for critical processes, and values empowering the people who do the job to determine how best to automate it - essentially rapidly growing, democratic organization.It's hard to imagine an inappropriate scenario to use Agiloft, but one that comes to mind is organzations requiring a complete, finished, highly structured solution that they do not want to change over time. Agiloft is designed with the expectation that clients will adapt it to their needs so many functions are left undone, rather than throwing a "kitchen sink" at the customer and letting them choose what they need.The best way to work with Agiloft is to take the training class, then have a small success with a small team, involving the employees and first level management in the deployment. They'll tell everyone else how much they like it. This reduces the possibility of slow development cycles and an undue dependence on outside expertise, while maximizing the return on Agiloft's investment in easy customizability.

VisualCron does accommodate continuous file processing. Like packing and unpacking compressed files, splitting or merging files, sending E-mail's and executing queries on databases. VisualCron in less suitable for performing very complex operations on files like, arithmetic with numbers, dates or amounts. Very complex job scripts become cluttered. Debugging Job scripts is not easy.

Incentivized

• Fully GUI based interface that has drastically reduced the time to add new features/workflows.
• The product was very easy to deploy and add features like Single-Sign On and user provisioning from our internal DataWarehouse. Again, vendor support was a big help while implementing those features.
• The workflows include a very comprehensive rule-based system that can trigger various actions like escalations, emails, changes of request state and more. All without any coding. Again, fully GUI based.

• VisualCron can pack and unpack files from many types of packing methods.
• Clear job scripts with complex constructions can be written in VisualCron
• VisualCron provides a clear graphical overview of the situation of all jobs.
• VisualCron clearly indicates when a job has run into an error.

Incentivized

• With flexibility comes complexity, so we have needed to use consulting time to implement some of our needs. The learning curve can be steep, but the product can accommodate nearly any scenario.
• At one point we seemed to have some performance issues, but those seem to be in the past.
• The text messaging integration would be nice.

• VisualCron should more specifically indicate the root cause of an error.
• If copying a file goes wrong, VisualCron reports 'can't copy file'. I expect 'no read permissions from original' or 'no write permissions from destination'.
• VisualCron offers no way to execute a Job script line by line
• In VisualCron, nested loops cannot be created.

Incentivized

We're comfortable and happy with our purchase of Agiloft. Our end users have been happy with the tool, and appreciate the time savings and efficiency it has gave them. Agiloft also appears to actually care about you being a customer, which makes a difference to me.

For the most part, it is an easy and intuitive system to use. There are many small things that could be improved to make the system work even easier. However, overall it is very easy to use if you have a good grasp on computer programs and using them to build things. I do not have any computer science or programming background, and I am able to use this system with few problems.

We often hear back very quickly with answers to our questions. They also support their answers at times with screenshots and videos to help further explain their advice and suggestions. The only reason it isn't a 10 is because sometimes using only the online support system, sometimes things aren't communicated as well as they would be over the phone. However, we know if there is a major issue going on, we can call Agiloft for support.

Questions and problems can be addressed to VisualCron 's support department via E-mail. I usually get a good answer from them fairly quickly. There is also a VisualCron forum where you can ask questions that will be answered by other VisualCron users.

Incentivized

Most of the other CRM software packages we evaluated were either too complicated or time
consuming to setup and customize, or they were too expensive, especially since many
of the companies charge additional fees for each additional module or function
you want to use.

For simple processes, VisualCron is easier to use and maintain. For complicated processes, Quadient Inspire offers more options. The graphical representations of waiting, running or completed jobs is adequate for both products. The logging of job actions is better in Quadient Inpire as in VisualCron.

Incentivized

• Helps us organize tasks and projects and the data associated with each project
• Helps us organize our resources to meet the demand of issues and events
• This has helped us keep moving forward during times we otherwise would have pulled back.
• Completely revolutionized our way of work life. Upwards of approx 300 percent productivity and complexity..

• With VisualCron, I need 3 times less time to get file processing right.
• If a VisualCron job goes wrong I need twice as much time to find the problem.
• Visualcron does not run on Linux but on Windows which can make an upgrade and reboot take up to 6 times as long.

Incentivized