Endevor Reviews

It is a tool the mainframe programmers use to do their work. If they need to make a change to a program, they go into Endevor and they check out a copy of the program. Then, they make their changes and check it back into Endeavor, and it gets built or compiled into whatever the language is. When they want to move a copy of it to QA for testing, they use Endevor to do that. Also, when it is time to go into production, they use Endevor to do that. The programmers do all their work through Endevor, and it is their bridge between development and production. 

The benefits are that we backup people's source code for them. They do not have to worry about losing it because Endevor keeps it for them, all kinds of previous versions. Endevor keeps track of everything that auditors need. That is a big thing. Any question that an auditor has about our processes and approvals is all stored in Endevor. We can give them reports and it makes them happy, especially when you work for a bank. 

What I like about Endevor personally is it can be very flexible, as far as how you use it. You can make it do nearly anything, but in really clever ways. It is very versatile. You can really customize it for your own shop pretty extensively, pretty easily. 

It may seem a little abstract, but when somebody approves an Endevor package, if they are able to approve, and let us say there's four different approvals that are needed. If they have the ability to approve at four different levels, and if they check off to approve the package it will approve all the way through. If I would like the person to be able to approve at one level. It doesn't matter which one it is, but they only can choose one thing, then somebody else has to do the other approvals. There is no way around it. I spent an entire day trying really hard once to figure out how to do that. In a shorter sentence, the ability to restrict one approval per approval level would be a big deal for us. 

Sometimes finding errors and output can be difficult because it spits out so many messages that it is hard to figure out which ones are the ones you need to look at and what flow did it actually take through the processor is what they call them. There are a lot of if-then-elses, sometimes it is hard to figure out which if-then-elses it actually did. When you can turn on what they call a trace, but if somebody asks you a question you want to just say, "Which one ran and which one failed?" That's not always easy. That could be a little easier. 

It is very stable. We have no problems.

One thing that is great about CA is that they worked with really big companies for a long time. We have no problems with scalability. It is excellent.

I have only ever opened one case as I am relatively new with the company, but they got right back to me and answered my question quickly. 

I was not involved in the initial setup.

There's really only two mainframe tools that do this, Endevor and something called ChangeMan. I used to support ChangeMan. It is good, but it is a lot simpler. If I was talking to somebody, I might point out the flexibility of the Endevor implementation and how you can do so many different things in really clever ways.