Control-M vs Kofax TotalAgility

• Control-M provides an easy-to-use and easy-to-interpret interface for users, with most of the screen options and field names being self-explanatory. The on-screen options provide for a full range of functionality for automating batch production requirements, with multiple options and flexibility.
• The vendor provides Control-M a wide range of utilities for extracting information from the dataset and providing with a minimal amount of training required for use.
• As the systems programmer for Control-M on the mainframe, the ease of installation is one of the nicest features. The installation is panel driven and can be used by a relatively inexperienced technician to install successfully in a matter of several hours.
• Again, as the systems programmer, I appreciate the level of expertise of the technical support personnel. Over the past 20+ years, I have come to know them well and find them to be knowledgeable and willing to provide assistance for any and all queries.
• The developers have always been willing to listen to requests for new functionality and enhancements to existing functionality and are working to have the same type of functionality across all platforms.
• We are a large mainframe shop, still heavily dependent on mainframes to support and develop new software for the mainframe.
• We have worked closely with BMC to participate in the beta testing program and have had the opportunity to have an impact on software development.

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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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• The reporting provided with Control-M could have more functionality, Many users end up creating their own reporting based on the Control-M DB. I believe BMC are addressing this.
• Within the Advanced File Transfer (AFT) it would be useful to have an integrated FT server and not rely on the underlying SSH.
• All batch schedulers have issues with fully automating tasks in a Windows environment and Control-M is no exception. Userids and profiles are harder concepts to deal with in the Windows world but BMC are doing their best to address this and Control-M would be better at handling these scenarios than the alternative products.

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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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• While I cannot share specific numbers I can say that Control-M has provided a level of scheduling and integration over the system it replaced that has increased productivity and increased reliably in our system. It has reduced the number of hours spent on monitoring and troubleshooting jobs, on a per job basis.

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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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