Control-M vs Kofax TotalAgility

• Control-M Advanced File Transfer is a very useful add-on, allowing for a wide variety of file transfers to be configured "out of the box" and then used as part of the standard batch flow. This module is not included in the base price but is available at a relatively small additional cost.
• Using Control-M's GUI (the Enterprise Manager) allows for efficient management of the enterprise and can tie up a lot of "loose ends". Often the first point of tracking problems is to check with the Control-M guys!
• BMC is definitely moving the product forward, the new module "Application Integrator" is very helpful in building and deploying your own bespoke Control-M jobs and allows for closer and more secure integration.
• Although Control-M does open up the enterprise in an operational sense, the security settings (should you choose to implement them) are robust.

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• Ease of use. The drag and drop configuration to create the processes makes the product easy to use and configure. Most of the icons are intuitive on what they are and how to use them. The use of the colored icons for each value also helps to know that that value is looking for.
• Forms. The capture forms are easy to create and maintain. A new field can be added to the Extraction group and then the capture form is regenerated and that field is automatically added to the form with all the proper attributes. If an additional check box or field is added to the form, that field stays when regenerated. This differs from KTA 6.0.
• Kofax has done pretty well integrating all the pieces of Kofax into one product. KC (Kofax Capture), KIC (Kofax Import Connector), KTM (Kofax Transformation Module with OCR), and workflow are all combined into KTA (Kofax Total Agility). This lets all of these features work together in one product. Kofax does keep adding more to the functions that maybe were left out original version. This makes Kofax Total Agility a robust product.

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• Single Major Action per job: this statement needs to be clarified. There are ways to do more than one action per job, and there are pre and post job commands available in most templates. Also some templates like FTP can have many instructions built in, like deleting source files after transfer (these are part of the positives). But basically you can only do one major action, like call one web service, or call one stored procedure per job. I believe this limitation is due to their licensing model, to ensure you will run as many jobs as possible.
• The only other negative is a necessary corollary of a having a powerful product. The learning curve is not simple due to the power of the product. I would recommend dedicate training for the primary operators and users of the product.

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• Exception management within the platform can certainly be improved upon. If a job is suspended for any particular issue integrations can be put in place to attempt to handle them but it is kludgy and does not always work as anticipated.
• The administration interface is based on Microsoft Silverlight which limits it to certain versions of Internet Explorer and the interface has seen better days. Their other application, Kofax Kapow, has a much more mature and intuitive interface. This supposedly is being replaced in the next major iteration but I have doubts it will be successfully done.
• The product is expensive. It is also the Cadillac of workflow platforms with document transformation built in. In many cases the product can do what you want it to do but there may be other more cost effective platforms.

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• Troubleshooting has improved with multiple groups as they are easily able to determine if data loss/job failure is the reason for a data issue.
• Conversion took significantly longer than was originally estimated by BMC so we had to run two platforms for almost 9 months. This definitely slowed down efficiency as many users did not know which tool to utilize for data load trouble shooting for close to a year.
• Being able to communicate with users across the globe in a universal language and time reference has vastly decreased data issues and greatly improved proficiency in getting new jobs implemented quickly and without problems.

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• Kofax TotalAgility is very expensive. Some customers have reported that using the KTA workflow has increased productivity and has a good ROI overall. The customers have not shared true numbers for me to give details.

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