Endevor Reviews

I use it on a daily basis as an administrator. It performs fairly well and has for 20-plus years.

It is the standardized tool for all of mainframe development. In the past, it is a big improvement over just using standard homegrown utilities. Having something that is out-of-the-box that you can customize to suit your organization's needs is huge.

It standardizes the processing of all the development. Everything gets produced in a constant and consistent manner.

The flexibility, because I know a lot of the competition pigeonholes you into definitions and character limitations, and Endevor is wide open. You can define it as broadly or as narrowly as you want.

I do not know that there is much more that they can do on the mainframe side. They need to ditch the Eclipse plugin and just make the development environment for Z the standard Eclipse interface.

It is still kind of behind the times. It needs to catch up with all the millennials that want a distributed look and feel.

No downtime, and it has been around for 30 years. I think it has got another 30 to go. So, it is doing really well.

It is very scalable. You can use it in a small shop. I have hundreds of thousands of users, and you can tailor it to suit anyone's needs.

When I was with technical support, it was outstanding. Now, they are okay. They are doing their best without me. 

The CA Community: We are one big, happy family. The development team support, all the customers around the world, and myself: We are one big Endevor family. We have known each other for decades. It is an awesome environment. A really good, tight community.

I was not involved with the initial setup. It was installed when I started working for this company. 

I do not do the upgrades. Somebody else does that. The whole separation of duties thing. The system programmer has to do one thing, and I do the rest.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: From my company's point of view, cost because it is only installed on the Windows part for Sysplex, and they are too cheap to pay for the multi-LPAR license.

Source control management.

It performs well.

It's very controlled. I can't say that it improves, the way our company functions. 

It's not so much that it, by itself, isn't beneficial, but that maybe the way we use it is not necessarily great.

There are lots of restrictions and it's difficult to move things through the process and to get things elevated. And then we'd have to do some crazy process to get a CCID created and you've got to submit a request here, and then you've got to have this and that.

We've got this other process, if you generate a package and then you forgot an item, then you have to add to it. We have to get someone else to reset your package and you've got to submit a different request and get someone to reset the package. It's just painful, instead of having the users have the control over what they're doing, and over that process.

• Version control 
• Being able to compare versions
• Being able to see the difference in the history

Learning the tool for the first time was extremely difficult, and it could be because of all the other processes we had around it. But knowing you can do these things in batch, you can do things in the foreground or online mode, and then these, you have to have a package for. There are these rules, and some of the concepts inside the tool are not clear, like what is the CCID? Why do I have to have one? What is that? And how is it used? As a developer, it's not important to me - I don't know what a CCID is, and I don't care - but apparently it's important to someone.

It seems extremely stable.

It seems scalable. I've never encountered any slowness. It seems that many, many users could use it without a problem.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are 

• that the tool meet your needs
• that it have the features and functions that you're looking for.

CA Endevor is better than not having any source control management, some kind of source control tools.

We use it to track changes to our schedules. It performs great.

It allows us more streamlined processes from test to development to QA to production. So, the product streamlines processes. 

The usability of it. It is pretty user-friendly.

Probably more of a web-based option for it, because it is mostly mainframe. We are looking for more web solutions to expand our users that are not mainframe savvy. 

It is very stable. Since it is on the mainframe, the mainframe is a very stable product, so it never interacts with it.

It is very scalable.

Not lately on my end, but we have in the past. I have had contacted them in the past with other tools for CA products. They are always great with good interaction. 

I was not involved in the initial setup.

Take a look at the tool. We have used it for years and never had any real issues with it.

It has performed very well. We use it for our CSS mainframe development.

It was really done because of an audit issue, which has since been cleared. It works very well for the organization and does what it needs to do. The developers do not have any complaints at the moment.

It was an easy install. 

I do most of the work with the processors now. Since it was all set up, it pretty much runs itself now. 

I know there is capabilities for web enablement to use with Eclipse, but we have not gone down that road any at all.

Stability has been really good. I have actually never had to open an issue or report an issue since I have been running it.

The scalability is real good. Our environment is not real large, but it works well for what we do. 

It has been awhile since I used the technical support. I have no problems at all with them.

The initial setup was easily understood as far as the concept. The setup was difficult. We did need technical services initially, but I spent very little time in having to do anything with it. 

We had help from CA Services. They were a great help. We have not needed their services since. 

It does exactly what it needs to do. Just make sure if you are going to license, ensure you license the right features.

My understanding is that Endever is one of the better software exchange management systems out there. I don't think people should really look at anything else. 

It does exactly what we need it to do. It has worked well for us because we've had it now for about five years. 

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. 

Source code management. It works well.

I do not think our organization could go without it.

Source code management.

It is very stable. We had issues early on (twenty-something years ago), but not now.

We can make it do pretty much whatever we want, depending on just how complicated we want it to be. It will do a lot of things if we tell it to.

It is not built that way. It has to be told. It is pretty flexible.

Technical support is always good, and they are getting better.

I was not part of the initial setup. I have gone through several releases of the software, though. Those were pretty straightforward.

I would definitely tell anyone looking for this type of solution to pursue Endevor.

We use it for source code management. We use it to basically keep our applications that we use day-to-day, month-to-month, and week-to-week, all up-to-date. We use it to move it through those areas and manage it for auditing purposes, like dev, QA, production, etc. Our developers use it to build code in those different stages and move it forward.

There are approvers which have to approve something before it can move from dev to test, then test to production. Therefore, it makes it very seamless and easy to trace. Not only that, but it is easy to make sure nothing is getting to a place that it should not, when it should not. For example, being able to prevent things moving up the chain, things moving back, or things being edited when they should not is huge for us. So it has been a great benefit.

The traceability and the footprint that it creates for every element and every piece of code that it is put in. Being able to track who did what and when is huge for us because auditors are going to come back, especially being a financial company, and say, "Why was this touched, and when?" 

You can trace it back to exactly who did anything and what it was connected to, based on the notes and all the information included with it. 

The graphical user interface. It would be a big tool to change (but needed), just because as the workforce kind of ages and retires, the younger generation is not as familiar with mainframe and looking at a green screen is not really a huge selling point to them. So, adding an updated graphical user interface and making it a little bit more like Eclipse, also making it more widespread, making it easier to install, and getting it setup, would be great. 

Otherwise, Endevor does what it needs to do and it is hard to say that it needs any kind of massive change because of its great scalability, and because of its great availability. It does what it needs to do, so it is hard to say anything needs to change massively.

So far, so good. We would love to get upgraded to 18, which has not happened. However, versions 16 and 17 have worked great. 

As far as stability, we have had minor issues. When we have minor issues, CA is great to jump out and help us. 

It is great. One of our systems has 21,000 elements, so you are talking about a ton of modules. You put it on the mainframe that has very high availability, and it just makes it great, because you can constantly use it and you can keep building as long as you have the space for it. Our storage and available are there, and as long as you have the storage availability you can keep going to build it as big as you want. You do not see any drop off as far as speed or the utilities in the system. None of that changes no matter how many elements you have, whether it is one or 21,000. 

This is part of the reason I work on Endevor. It is completely different than other tools I have used. It is easy to use and is very intuitive to where you can sit there and it will keep growing, but it does not change. You do not have to learn a new thing, because you have gotten too big or anything like that, thus I really enjoy it.

Their customer service is second to none. From what we have seen. I have a couple of them that I can reach out to directly. They provide instant feedback on how to fix our problems and how to get to what we need done.

Since I have been there, we did not have anything before that, but it makes it so it is not chaos, where anybody can go in anytime. 

I have been involved with the initial setup of version 18. I was not involved with the initial onboarding of Endevor. With version 18, so far, so good. There have been a couple stumbling blocks just setting up the different check boxes that you have to check to get certain features applied. But even then, if you go through the documentation or you reach out to customer service, you can get those pretty quick and easy. 

There are a few steps along the way that we stumbled on, but they were quick fixes and they were pretty minor.

I would recommend the product. It is very easy to use. It is great as far as what it does. Once you have learned it and figured it out, it is right there as one of the best products you can get. 

Primary use case would be that our application developers use Endevor for managing their mainframe software. They take their source code and they add it in to Endevor, and Endevor translates that source code into an output executable, and then from there it would get deployed to the various development areas, QA areas, and then finally to production.

I think the most valuable features are the automatic building from the source code to the executable, and the way Endevor migrates the executables through the software lifecycle. I'm looking at it at more from a company perspective, from Aetna's perspective, that's the big benefit there.

And as far as for me, because I'm an Endevor administrator, I actually have to use Endevor to administer Endevor, so I use it almost in the way our customers use it. It's a cool product. Very robust, very solid.

In terms of features, I know because I'm a validation partner with CA, where we see what's coming down the pike. 

I know there's been a lot of work that they're doing on the long name support. 

Unix systems services, that whole side of the z/OS Operating System. I know they've been really doing a lot of work improving that.

The ISPF interface, adding long name support to that. 

In addition, they've been doing a lot of work on the new GUI front end to Endevor, so you could have a developer that does not really have much mainframe knowledge, and they'd be able to go on to this GUI interface, it's called the Eclipse Plugin to Endevor, and they'd be able to get up and running very quickly. No need to possess those mainframe skills, because they're doing it almost like they're working on their own PC, but they're connected to the mainframe. And sometimes they don't even know it.That's something that they've been working on and improving over the past several years. Right now we have that in a testing area and it's been working very well.

Stability is unbelievable. Over the years it's really improved dramatically.

Scalability, it can handle a company that really doesn't have that many software assets, all the way through big companies like my company that can handle huge numbers of software assets. Very scalable.

I would rate them "excellent." Very satisfied. I call them and, usually within minutes, I get a phone call back. Typically I'm reaching the right person and they're knowledgeable. And if not, they refer it to the next level, but generally they can take care of it.

What we were using before was actually a CA product, a product called Panvalet, but that was like a prior generation of product, and Endevor is the newer type of product, so we went over to Endevor back in the '90s.

Actually I was not involved in the initial setup at the company I'm with now, but I was involved in it with the company I was with before.

Back in those days - this was years ago - at that point in time, it was complex in a way because the product was so flexible. You really have to figure out what you want to do first, even without the product there, just figure out how you want to handle things, and then you take the product, Endevor, and you kind of overlay it on top of what you want to do at your company. But it's so flexible you can do almost anything you want with it. Sometimes that can add to the complexity, but once you have the knowledge of the product, then the complexity goes away.

There might have been a couple of products that we looked at back when I was at my other company, but Endevor was clearly - even in those days, back in the early '90s - the leader at that point in time. I can't even really recall what other products were part of the mix that we looked at. The other ones didn't really even last long, Endevor was the leader even back then, and I feel that they're definitely the leader right now, still.

When our company is selecting a vendor, the criteria include

• the actual software itself - to make sure that the software meets the requirements  
• that the vendor is solid as far as the way they deliver on their support
• that they have the appropriate service level agreements for support, and emergency types of procedures in place.

I have to give Endevor a 10 out of 10. The reason why really goes back to all the things I've talked about so far. It's just really robust, it can handle pretty much anything. A requirement we get from our customers internally, we're able to take that and translate it into something that is workable for our customers, using Endevor. It's very much open ended, and I don't really see any situation where we're not able to deliver on a customer requirement.

I would definitely advise to go with Endevor, no question. There are a few others on the market, Compuware has ISPW, which I really don't know that much about. There's ChangeMan, but I think Endevor definitely is the one. That's the one I know best, and I talk to a lot of people - I'm a member of the New England Endevor Usergroup - and in my view, it's number one, up there in the marketplace as far as what it does.