Task Factory works great, as long as you can wait a long time between upgrades
May 14, 2019

Task Factory works great, as long as you can wait a long time between upgrades

Karl Wiggins | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Task Factory

We purchased Task Factory for one purpose - to connect to our production and development Dynamics 365 CRM environments via SSIS to internal SQL Servers for SSRS reporting.
  • Relatively easy to set up and use on a SQL Server.
  • Works like other connections in SSIS packages.
  • When Microsoft upgraded our Dynamics 365 install from version 8 to 9, we delayed the upgrade for several months. Once we moved our dev platform to version 9, Task Factory stopped working. After we pushed every delay we reasonably could in prod, Task Factory had still not been updated to work with version 9 of Dynamics 365. In the interim we tried another product that had already been updated in lockstep with Microsoft. The Task Factory folks seemed to indicate that they knew about the problems when we called, and sent us a hotfix eventually after two or three months. However, the delay convinced us to go to another product.
  • Weird or incorrect metadata in Dynamics 365 caused problems with the SSIS job whenever field changes were made in Dynamics 365. While this might not be the fault of Task Factory per se, our replacement product doesn't have this issue.
  • Initial impact was positive. Task Factory was not very expensive, and it worked.
  • Once Microsoft upgraded Dynamics 365 from version 8 to 9, Task Factory did not support the new version for several months after our upgrade, and we had delayed our production upgrade for at least four months. This forced us to buy another competing product that did support version 9.
  • Licensing did not allow us to install the product on developer workstations for test/dev without buying another product license, but this is not a particular weakness of Task Factory. In other words, other products we have used had the same limitation. Still, it forces us to modify SSIS packages directly on the server as opposed to our laptops.
CData Software was evaluated initially, and while we chose to go with Task Factory initially due to cost and simplicity, in the end we had to purchase CData's product anyway when Task Factory was not updated to work with Microsoft Dynamics 365 v. 9 for months after it was released to production.
We had a very narrow use case for Task Factory - connecting to Dynamics 365 and pulling data down to an internal SQL Server for reporting. While it worked once it was set up, the long delay between the Dynamics 365 upgrade from version 8 to 9 (forced by Microsoft) and Task Factory's support for the new version forced us to another product.

SolarWinds Task Factory Feature Ratings

Connect to traditional data sources
6
Simple transformations
8
Complex transformations
8