JAMS - An Enterprising Look at Automation

Very easy to scale up from a hardware and application perspective between the installation processes across multiple OSes and placing the servers within the JAMS environment. Between standing up a server and getting it connect is very easy and straight forward, the only issue with scalability is with the job management aspect. If we need to copy or apply a large number of varying jobs to the new setup it does take some time as the copy function and implementing the folder structure with appropriate settings and overrides can take up some overhead on the process.

The engineers at JAMS are very knowledgeable and provide in depth technical support in a timely fashion. While our group doesn't often send requests when we do the level of detail as well as clear guidance on any information on technical issues is great. For more open ended items or data related requests that may not necessarily be out of the box the do a good job of providing a framework of solutions to allow us to implement within our system.

JAMS excels for simpler workflows that don't require in depth coding solutions within the JAMS environment, while still providing the option and extensibility to implement larger in house scripting as the situation demands. Being able to create long sequences of simple steps works well in JAMS as it's quick and easy to implement for various end users of different skill sets as well as providing the necessary scheduling and process infrastructure to help monitor and manage these processes. Whether is navigating across external servers and running executables or transferring files, JAMS covers those areas well while adding some helpful in house settings to automate job handling and process monitoring. However if we want to extend these sequences to be more robust and automate multiple executions of jobs, the learning curve increases rather sharply to adequately leverage the JAMS library correctly and efficiently across a higher number of moving parts. Navigating the JAMS data structure takes time even with the developers guide however because the platform is more open ended finding a solution is easier to this problem.