Fortra's JAMS Room for Improvement

Rob Grafrath - PeerSpot reviewer
VP, Enterprise Systems at Capio

The biggest area with room for improvement is the area that my organization benefits the most from using JAMS, and that is in custom execution methods. I happen to have a very good C# developer. Ever since we got JAMS, he has spent a lot of time talking to JAMS developers, researching the JAMS libraries, and creating custom execution methods. He's gotten very good at it. He is now able to create them and maintain them very easily, but that was hard-won knowledge. If I ever lose this developer, I would be hard-pressed to find anyone who could create JAMS custom execution methods as well as he can since there really isn't all that much help, such as documentation or information, available on how to create custom execution methods. 

I really think that they could benefit greatly by being much more transparent about C# development, maybe by making a JAMS cookbook or a developer portal where they could throw ideas at each other.

One of my complaints with the marketing around JAMS is that it says things like, "It integrates with Teams". They talk about integrating with a lot of things, but marketing doesn't tell you that they are talking about JAMS running PowerShell jobs. Since PowerShell can automate things like SharePoint and Teams, that is how marketing gets away with saying it has so many integrations. JAMS doesn't have as many built-in integrations as they advertise. I think they should build more of them, and improve on the ones they have built.

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AG
Systems Engineer at Umpqua Holdings

It is important to receive notifications if a charged job fails and SQL is halted. JAMS does not provide halted notifications by default, which is a critical feature that needs to be added.

Fortra's JAMS has an encryption code, but they are not compliant with the open-source GPG program, which is a requirement. They are planning to add the GPG program by customizing and bundling it with JAMS, which would be great. Currently, we are using open-source software, and it begs the question of why we are using JAMS. JAMS has an encryption code, but it lacks a PGP engine in the server or an extra connection. They have added it, but version 7.3 is not functional. However, version 7.5 offers more job features, increased connections to the store, and enhancements to the cloud base, such as Azure, which makes it easier to access the cloud.

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DS
Application & Cloud Migration Administrator at State of Minnesota

I would like to see the ability to interface with Microsoft group-managed service accounts, but they're still in the research phase. They need to ensure everything's legit and safe. The report designer and dashboards could also be improved. We're running 7.3, so I don't know if they have updated the reporting in 7.5, but I think the reports and dashboards could be better.

If I open one of JAMS' pre-installed reports but don't launch it on the server where the scheduler's installed, it will take forever to load through our VPN connections. It may be related to how we have our servers set up. I don't know if that's an issue with JAMS or not, but I need to be careful about where I open the report designer. Otherwise, I will sit there with an endless blue circle. I can open it on my workstation or use a remote desktop to access the server and open it via that. 

It would be helpful if the data in that report designer could be leveraged in Power BI. I don't know if they have that already, but that could be one way to improve the reporting and dashboards. Maybe there's already a way to do that. I should look at their website first or contact support because Fortra's support is fantastic and always super helpful.

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Buyer's Guide
Fortra's JAMS
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Fortra's JAMS. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Kammy Olive - PeerSpot reviewer
Network and Local Support Manager at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees

JAMS is going to disagree with me about the following, because they think that this is not always a problem. But since COVID, we have had a lot of people working from home who can't always connect to the JAMS server. We use VPN, as most companies do, and we have it set up so that everybody can access the JAMS server. But many times, our people cannot access it.  They'll try to log in to JAMS and will tell me they can't and I don't know why not. Nothing has changed. 

I have to look at their access and what is wrong with their IP. We've discovered some problems over the years that have been the cause, and that's because it's all behind the scenes to us. We have two VPN servers and we figured out that one of the VPN servers didn't have the permissions for it to log in to the JAMS IP address. We fixed that. And sometimes, new people think that they can just log in to the JAMS server, but they haven't been set up with permissions. 

But JAMS could do a better job of telling you what the problem is when you try to log in to the server. The way it works now is that if you can't log in to the server, it brings up a long form that you have to submit. And nobody likes to submit a long form and sit back and wait.

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Aaron Warnke - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Business Intelligence Developer at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

Fortra is getting much better with documentation and examples, but there is still room for improvement.

There are a few minor issues on the schedule for items to be fixed; there are workarounds, but I'm looking forward to a patch that will resolve them more conclusively. There's a built-in report executer to deliver reports, which we can send to an individual, but we can't CC other staff, for example.

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Scott Basham - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at Concentrix

When looking at a folder in JAMS with many jobs, it would be good to have better information in the list display of what's inside those jobs. We get some information, but other important details are missing.

Sometimes it's difficult to find which workflow or workflows a job is in which could be improved.

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JR
Student Services SQL Server Manager at Health Care Compliance Association

I would like a simple web interface that I could give to my team to go in and kill jobs or see why jobs died so that we don't have to drill down deeper into the application and know everything about it. It would be good to have a really clean web engine that would say here are the jobs running.  We can then click to see the time running and whether any of them fails and other similar things. I know they have one, but it's not very simplistic. It would be awesome to have a simple one. 

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BK
Manager of Technical Services with 11-50 employees

As an admin, I would like to have a web-based GUI instead of a client application that we have to install on our PCs. Many applications are moving to web-based GUIs, so it would be convenient if we could use JAMS without having to install a client on our machines. We could simply go to our local servers or website and manage everything from there.

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BM
IT Analyst at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

The documentation is not super. There are things that I want to do in JAMS, but I just haven't gotten my head around them yet. For example, I keep saying that workflows would be really handy for us. We can't risk moving our production stuff or testing stuff there. But when I'm testing in the UAT environment, I run out of jobs. They have examples that don't apply to my situation when it comes to running things. The documentation is probably all there, but it's not the easiest to navigate through. It's not as quick and slick as I'd like it to be.

Their support team is a live chat and they are top-notch. I can say I have a job that's failed because of something, and they can probably give me a pointer, really fast, on what's happened, but I wouldn't use them if I'm trying to learn a new functionality or process. I wouldn't ask them to give me a complete step-by-step. That's not their function. They would probably point me to some documentation that would be a massive PDF or some support page, but I just lose the will to live reading them.

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Prakash Srivastava - PeerSpot reviewer
JAMS Admin at Public Service Enterprise Group Incorporated

One issue which can prevent jobs from running is when a script gets into a loop. Suppose, using WinSCP, that the script connects to a particular vendor but that vendor has changed its server security key. I have to manually accept the new key so that it trusts the new server. Until that happens, the job will be stuck. It retries without end. JAMS will not kill it, even if it is running for, say, four days. We will only realize there's an issue on Sunday when there is a reboot for all the Windows servers, including JAMS. The reboot will kill any hung threads, and then we know something was stuck for days.

I think there is a way to configure JAMS so that if a job is running for so long it will shoot out an email saying, "This job is still running." I pinged support about it a long time ago and they said something like that to me, but I have not been able to configure it yet.

Also, I'm not sure if they have fixed it in a newer version, but there is no global search in the version I have. If I have multiple sub-folders that are named for business units, like HR or IT, and I have to search for a job, I cannot search from the top. I have to go to the HR folder to search for a particular job, or to the IT folder. It would be good to have a global search, where I could search from the top, rather than having to go into sub-folders.

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PF
Director of IT Operations at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

The product does not allow the users to cut and paste the job names from the screen.

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JM
Business Objects Data Manager at a wellness & fitness company with 51-200 employees

In the version that we are using, it does validations when you try to delete an object and if there are any dependencies in place, the deletion process will not proceed for obvious reasons. However, there is no information provided as to what it was that caused the validation to fail. Where is that dependency? Right now, it's quite a tedious process to find which object is getting in the way. Getting information with details of the failure would be very helpful.

Also, sometimes the interface is slow. It will lock up the application for no apparent reason.

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Chris Waring - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Vice President, Managed Services and Delivery at Powwr

I would like the ability to have the JAMS client, where we monitor everything, be fully web-based and secured so only certain people can access it. It should be set up and look similar to the actual JAMS client that we use as a desktop application on the server. A fully web-based JAMS would be nice for traveling or when you are not able to directly access the actual server with the client when we want to log in.

All my machines at work are Macs. JAMS client is a Windows-based thing. It is all built on .NET, which makes perfect sense. However, that means in order for me to access it, I need to connect to a VPN, then log onto one of our Azure VMs in order to access the JAMS client. This is fine, but if for some reason I am unable to do so, it would be nice to be able to have a web-based JAMS client that has all the exact same functionality in it. There are probably a whole bunch of disadvantages that you would get with that as well, but that is definitely something that would make life easier in a few cases. 

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VK
Data Architect at San Francisco Public Works

The client needs a complete revamp as it is not the most intuitive of methods of setting up jobs.    We have encountered situations like options disappearing and with no obvious way of getting it back, we have had to open up a Support ticket just to figure out how to get the missing options back

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Alejandro Parro Jr. - PeerSpot reviewer
Presales Engineer at Bridgeway Communication System, Inc.

I am also supporting and reselling Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT and am interested in Genesys' file-transfer solution of Genesys. Compared to GoAnywhere, Genesys has limited options. The tabs in the JAMS file transfer could be clearer. It would help us demonstrate to our client that JAMS not only automates jobs but also does fast transfers, and it's an alternative that supports and filters different kinds of platforms. Filtering file transfers will be highly beneficial to them.

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AT
Database Administrator at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

JAMS lacks source control features. Our previous solution had job control language, but JAMS doesn't. When migrating between versions, JAMS doesn't migrate all the data, like job change history, etc. Also, the scheduler doesn't have a way to make jobs invisible, so you can temporarily turn a job off if you decide not to run it today.

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GR
CTO at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

We are still using JAMS 6.5, so I don't really feel comfortable talking about room for improvement as much because we're still using a little bit of the older version. My understanding is that the newer version has some additional capabilities. One thing that I know that the JAMS people said that they were working on that would be huge for us is a search capability so that you could search for tasks.

It may be available in version 7 or in a future release of 7. I think that's on their roadmap. But right now, for us to do a search, we have to search through database queries.

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DT
Database Administrator at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The ACL or access permission area needs to be improved. When it comes to defining and providing security permissions, it's a bit confusing if you are new to JAMS. JAMS needs to improve the features for security access or permissions.

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MB
Sr Analyst at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The UI could be better. There were some things that were not quite intuitive, such as the search tool. When we tried to search for jobs, we had to clear the entire search and then go in and enter the new search query. That's something that wasn't intuitive for a new user.

Sometimes, when we used to search for jobs, it did not give us the status. There was system slowness or something like that. I am not sure if that had to do with JAMS, but that was something that we noticed.

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SP
Director of IS at Bennington Marine, LLC

If there were a softcover book on how to really take advantage of all of JAMS' tools, I would buy it. I do better with training books than online searching, so a book would be helpful. I would read the whole thing and learn as much as possible about the product.

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YC
Technical Operations Manager at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

JAMS handles exceptions fairly well but there are some areas where it might improve a little bit. It has to do with being able to automatically handle exceptions, out-of-the-box, rather than having to code them. I'd also like to be able to do different things, based on what the actual exception is. In our current version, there's a placeholder where you should be able to do some things along those lines, but we've never actually been able to get it to work. I've seen in the 7.x versions that that has been fixed.

In terms of automation, there are some scenarios that we're still working on trying to automate and we just haven't been able to find an applicable solution through JAMS for those yet. I'm excited to see, once we get to that point, if we can do those things in the newer version.

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Jayvie Otinez Britanico - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Lead at a comms service provider with 1-10 employees

While JAMS's cross-platform capabilities are good, my only concern is the need to download an ODBC driver to connect to specific databases. It would be highly beneficial if JAMS natively supported these connections, eliminating the need for separate driver downloads for each database.

With no programming experience, I find JAMS code-driven automation challenging due to the required PowerShell scripting. While JAMS offers helpful guides, the technical barrier remains significant.

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HS
Development Manager at CREDIT-SUISSE-SERVICES-IN

The solution is good, it's reliable. But sometimes the UI is not the most responsive I've ever used. But because it does its job, I don't complain.

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IR
Database Administrator at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

The only thing that they could improve on is the fact that they don't have a browser version of JAMS. They've got all the bits and pieces there if you want to build your own web version of it. It does come with a web client, but it's pretty clunky. They could improve on that.

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MS
DBA at a marketing services firm with 11-50 employees

The search capability needs to be improved because when we try to search for a job, it's hard to do. We have to know where it is. This is really the functionality that I think is lacking.

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GB
General Manager at The eniac corp

There could be a better simulation for banning the termination. You have to simulate every one of the processes in order to have an idea for better planning. This kind of simulation is broken and needs improvement.

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Buyer's Guide
Fortra's JAMS
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Fortra's JAMS. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.