There's one persnickety issue about NAS permissions. That is a problem we have run into with GoAnywhere. I would like to see more focus on compatibility with/enforcement of user roles and access permissions across NAS, among other things. We have filed a couple of tickets on that in the past.

Pretty much everything we've needed to connect to has been done fairly seamlessly.

The only issue I've had with connectivity, database or otherwise, revolved around an SSH key. I tried to create a key, but it was incompatible with a vendor's SFTP. And when that vendor has tried to create a key and share it with me, I have not been unable to import it into GoAnywhere. I had to use a third-party app to create the key and find something that was mutually compatible. I've submitted tickets on that to GAMFT for consideration.

They could possibly improve the error handling on jobs. Whenever it generates error logs, sometimes the error is very generic. It takes a little work to diagnose what's really going on. It may just say "IO Exception" and that doesn't really tell you much.

They need to increase the number of Cloud Connectors and speed up their development of them.

Also, there are a number of built-in tasks in GoAnywhere. One, in particular, the write to CSV task, is slow. If you have, say, 100,000 records in your row set and you want to write them to a CSV file, it takes a long time. That definitely requires performance improvement.

The solution's built-in functions could be better; I want to see easier file transfers and management. 

The security could be upgraded to address novel cyberattacks. I'm not sure whether the product's security is being updated periodically. 

I want to be able to use GoAnywhere to create customizable reports that I can share with the MSP containing any information related to file transfers.

The solution's support for the Unix platform and AS2 should be improved. The solution's scalability needs to be improved as it has very limited scalability.

The solution could include some multi-factor authentication (MFA), one-time password, or secondary authentication.

The process of adding a vendor is very easy. You just point and click. You create your job, schedule, and project, and off you go. You just need to know what the processes do when you add in a new job that runs daily and so on. For us, it is not a problem, but maybe the documentation on that could be a little more straightforward. We, however, have no problems figuring that out. It is pretty straightforward for us.

In terms of features, it is perfect for the way we use it. They just need to keep up with the security stuff, and that's about it. They should make sure that GoAnywhere or HelpSystems stays on top of security, and they're dealing with all the necessary issues that come up on a daily basis on the internet with the security. Other than that, all our needs are being met. The way it is right now, it is perfect for us. We have no other needs for it. We're definitely not asking HelpSystems for any improvements. So, we're fine and satisfied with it.

It doesn't need much improvement, other than tiny idiosyncrasies. I've run into one or two things for which I've put in change requests to the software developers at GoAnywhere, but they are very minor things, the types of things that don't come up much. We've created in the neighborhood of 80 to 90 projects in GoAnywhere and, out of all of those, there have only been a couple where we've run into something and that made us say, "I wish they could improve this little thing here."

For example, when it comes to interacting with files, there is a function referred to as write CSV, to write a general text file. In this scenario of creating a simple text file, I ran into a situation where, if the product saw a quote or a double-quote in the data, it started wrapping all the text fields in double-quotes. The request I put in asks them to provide a feature that leaves my data alone and does not interpret anything. If I don't want double quotes, please don't put them in. It should have the option, on certain write CSV operations, of not inferring anything.

There's not a lot of improvement I can think of. Maybe in the tools section, there is a SQL Wizard which works really well. I think that the SQL Wizard could use some improvement- it's little slow when moving from page to page. 

I'm on the admin side of it, and one of the complaints is that it times out too quickly for the people who are using the internet-based part of it. It could be that there is a way to do it, but I just don't know how. 

One of the things that I wish is to not necessarily have to set up a username and password for people with whom we don't frequently share files. For instance, if I want to share files with a patient who is not somebody with whom we share files all the time, I would like them to somehow verify who they are and be able to push the file to them. I shouldn’t have to set them up as a user with a password. It should be almost like Dropbox.

The support desk has room for improvement. I keep opening tickets and they keep telling me that they're closed, but they're not resolved.

Customer service is an area in need of improvement.

We have it implemented on-prem only. That's one of the issues we have. When we restart the agent on each server, it tries to go out to the internet and it takes about a 13-minute timeout before it can move forward. Why is there a 13-minute timeout value when trying to go to the internet? Shouldn't it be a minute or so? We weren't sure why it was taking that long, and then we noticed that it took almost exactly 13 minutes, every single time. We looked into it and we found out that it could be a timeout value. They checked with their developers and they said, "Yeah, it looks like it is a timeout value." We have worked with a support engineer and they definitely know about it, but so far there is no fix.

If they could limit that timeout or give us a way to modify it so we could have a faster timeout, that would help us at least knock out a half-hour's worth of outage.

In addition, when you log in through the GUI, it always fails the first time and says that your time expired, and it makes you log in twice. Supposedly it's a bug. If they could fix that, that would be awesome.

Also, in some areas it could be more user-friendly, when it comes to adding certificates and or keys for access.

Some of the description boxes can't be expanded. They're too narrow. You have to slide stuff over to see them.

There have been a few things that GoAnywhere couldn't handle. We discovered one recently that was beyond the scope of our original requirements. API functionality wasn't part of our initial unit testing because it wasn't necessary then. However, shortly after implementing GoAnywhere, two different vendors approached us to do API transactions. We checked to see if GoAnywhere could do this and found that it was supposed to have that capability, but it broke down. It completed the transaction, but it didn't correctly parse the JSON. Specifically, heavily nested JSON files break down when it attempts to parse the data.

There's a workaround. You have to reorganize the JSON file, and then GoAnywhere can read it. We went in a different direction since we didn't want to be hacking our solution. Their JSON readers aren't fully developed. When we implemented it, their EDI was in its infancy. We've been very successful with the EDI implementation, but there are a few pieces in their EDI implementation that are a little bit clunky. 

We had a meeting with them a couple of weeks ago because they're looking to advance that side of the product and wanted our input on what we would change in the EDI section. We gave it to them. It's an area they are looking to develop. I would recommend they continue to build in that space.

When it comes to GoAnywhere's workflow features, there are a couple of areas where I'd like to get a little more consistency. The two aspects of scheduling that we use are scheduled jobs and monitors. And there's cross-capability between the two. We've done some philosophical thinking about when a function should be handled by a monitor and when it should be handled by a scheduled job. When a monitor invokes a project to accomplish something, that gets logged as a job. I've had a little difficulty figuring out where to look to see the monitor's activities itself, to see if the monitor is having a problem. 

For instance, if an account on a secure FTP server has expired, the monitor that uses that account doesn't announce to us that it's having a problem. I want to work with them on this to get it fixed.

Another aspect would be greater visibility into exactly what's happening. But part of that is because we haven't learned how to look at it. I still need to establish some training for my people who support this. We've learned a lot and done a lot with the documentation, which is pretty good, but some formal training would really help tie together a lot of the little tidbits of knowledge in our heads.

I think that this product has most of the features we require, although the license is expensive.

DNS support needs attention. If the hostname has a dash in it then it does not work. Without a dash being included, it works fine. This is something that needs to updated in the next release.

The shared mailbox support for OWA in the cloud needs to be improved. The shared mailbox does not have a password, and we cannot use it. If there is a password for it then it works well.

if you have host name with example aaa-fgju than in web user ip filter list the name aaa-fgju will not work. If you have host name fghhg1 then it will work. The agent is good feature but license is bit expensive. 

In using this product, I have not found many areas of the product or service that need to be completely improved. However, with any product, improvement of a service or product can always be reviewed. If one were to look to improve it:

1. Continue to look forward and listen to its customers. 
2. Improvement in support or product relies on being ingenious, supportive, and listening to its customer base. 

Fortra needs to offer more use cases for GoAnywhere MFT during training.

At present, HelpSystems GoAnywhere MFT integrates with an antivirus solution, but it's a bit kludgy. It would be nice if the antivirus were built into the product so that it doesn't require integration.

The security features must be updated regularly. The newer versions must be released sooner. The solution must add new features at least every year. The solution must provide integration with SSO.

GoAnywhere's interface could be a little more intuitive. It can be hard to grasp at first, but once you have a decent understanding, it's pretty straightforward.

In some cases, the logs need deeper information. In terms of communication and checking, they need to go a little deeper.

In some scenarios, when you are in a cluster environment, the load-balancing capabilities of the gateway need to be improved a little. This functionality needs some improvement.

In general, workflow features are good, but when you need to use the transformation capabilities, there are some problems in terms of the way they manage the resources of the machine. There are some limitations in the size of the file, so the transformation capability has to be improved. 

Until now, I think the solution very good for me and my clients. If I had to name one thing that I think should be improved, I think it is that there are quite a lot of features and we do not use all of them. So a thing that could be done to improve this situation is maybe for HelpSystems to offer a lite version that also costs a bit less.  

Its user interface can be improved. The current user interface is a little basic for some of the use cases. We have to use an external component to enhance it. When we need a more appealing user interface, we use an additional component, and that works okay.