Fortra’s Automate Reviews and Ratings

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

HelpSystems Automate is an essential part of our everyday work. It not only the primary tool for EDI and data transfers, but it is also our primary automated reporting tool. IT does both running of custom SQL reports directly and sends automated reports generated by other systems. It lifted the burden of manual reports run by our customer service team, it sends exception alerts to our management team from everything from inventory changes, time and attendance, and system stability reports when machines crash. It even does reminders when certain data criteria are met and things need to get done based on a schedule. It's just amazing. It's also refreshing that it's a fully-featured tool that doesn't limit the tools behind a paywall. The next level up is due to management and complexity. It's just amazing.

Likelihood to Recommend

It's great for repetitive or regularly scheduled activities like reports or file transfers. However, it's not so good for on-demand activities. It doesn't support task shortcuts to run specific tasks. If it did it would be perfect.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Automate BPA Server just in our department to manage a number of tasks. Our primary jobs are essentially ETL related. Retrieving files from an FTP server, importing those files, processing, then sending email notifications on the results. Due to the vast number of jobs each day, AutoMate solves most of our issues and allows us to be less hands-on throughout the day.

Likelihood to Recommend

Anything where automation would be helpful, I'd recommend. If you're doing a task over and over again, Automate can likely work and do it for you. It helps to keep things running exactly the same so that when failures occur, they can easily be traced to their source.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

<div>[It's] mainly used as a platform for FTP jobs - approximately 30 vendors. It's also used to check completion of processes and to copy files. It has a very flexible job triggering capability...either schedules or files can trigger a job. While programming knowledge is not required, a knowledge of programming principles is recommended (If/then, loops, etc.).</div><div>

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Likelihood to Recommend

<ul><li>A medium to large sized company where there are a lot of similar tasks (FTP, purging, etc.) that have to be done on a regular as needed basis.</li><li> Also good where you don't have a dedicated programmer or they are too busy to dedicate time to these types of jobs. Creating the tasks is almost an object-oriented scenario. i.e.: drag what you need to where you need it.</li></ul>

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have a customer who is using AutoMate. They wanted us to see the functionality provided by AutoMate. They were using it for wiki pages and blogs etc. They were using it to automate the publication and approval process. They were also using the triggers component of AutoMate. Overall they were using the minimal components.

Likelihood to Recommend

AutoMate is well suited to automate daily manual labor.