JAMS Reviews

I use JAMS to run repetitive tasks that I need to do each day, like loading database entries, performing backups, and building daily reports. The organization uses it for complex workflows, sequences, and ad hoc jobs.

We aren't using JAMS for much complex scheduling. We schedule tasks on weekdays, but we aren't using a calendar to specify holidays. That is something on the to-do list. We want to have it scheduled to run on the work week except for holidays or other exceptions. However, it can run jobs based on sets of schedules and sequences. 

We consolidated several Windows scheduling servers into the dev and production JAMS environments. A few servers still have custom-scheduled tasks, but we moved most jobs from Windows Task Scheduler to JAMS.

JAMS helps us troubleshoot stalled jobs. For example, if I get a work ticket to check out a failing job, it's easy to look at the log file tab on the job and quickly get the details I need. Error logs are verbose and well-written, so I know what is wrong, whether it's the credentials or a file that can't be found. 

If a job fails or there's a trigger for a bad read text pattern, JAMS will send an email alert. I usually don't hear or see the functions, and I don't know if anybody is watching the monitor tab in the scheduler to see if there are any failing jobs. Aside from any email alerts when a job fails, I have found no real dashboards—at least not with 7.3. It may not be the case with the latest version.

It hasn't enabled us to eliminate monitoring tools so far. Only a few teams use JAMS to send custom monitoring reports, and additional software comes with the VM build. It hasn't been removed. All of the organization-wide tools stay, but some of them might be utilized less. If those teams are using custom JAMS reports more than other tools, it's probably because they could tailor their JAMS script to display the information that's most relevant to their team's needs. 

JAMS provides some flexibility in that aspect. They can run jobs to check the status of the database or Windows services. It gives them the freedom to build those tasks into a sequence or a workflow and get that report back fast instead of using a tool like SolarWinds. You'd need to create a dashboard and find an admin person, and that'll take time, whereas they can just do this quick job, and it gives them the exact information they want. JAMS frees up some at-instance time. Job automation, scheduling, and the ability to pause while other jobs finish saves time. 

I like how you can add new execution methods on the fly. It isn't overly complex to add Python script support to an execution method in the JAMS system. The scheduling is excellent. You can schedule a maintenance window and take that resource unit out of everything. It halts all of the jobs. 

We did that when we upgraded the last time. It's helpful because we don't need to worry about upstream and downstream jobs or any triggers and kickoffs. I also like that the JAMS uses PowerShell and has a PowerShell module. 

Regarding JAMS' exception handling, I will say that the person scripting a job should try to catch those exceptions and do their own internal logic for it. JAMS will generate an error if I write a script with an exception, and it'll display that error in the log. JAMS catches it. 

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.

The company has been using JAMS for about two years, but I've only used it for a year and a half. 

JAMS has been pretty stable. We have a single instance, so we're not running high availability, and the uptime has been solid. We have only had to go down to do scheduled reboots for server patching.

It's easy to scale the VM vertically where JAMS is deployed. To scale horizontally and install more agents, we would need to buy more licenses for the agents. It's a matter of contacting support and having the money to buy more licenses. It isn't too difficult to contact our account rep. We don't have problems buying licenses for additional agents. 

It would be cool if we could install multiple agents and have the scheduler server ensure we only use the number of licenses or agents allotted under our licensing agreement. For example, if our prod environment has licenses for three agents, we could deploy six agents that are available to run jobs, but the scheduler would ensure that only three agents are active simultaneously within that environment. That would be an interesting feature.

I rate Fortra's support a ten out of ten. The turnaround is always quick when I email them. They're knowledgeable about it. I can send them a few screenshots and logs, and they respond with some suggestions. They typically resolve the problem on the first try. I haven't used their telephone support, but other people have told me that works just as well.

I wasn't around for the initial installation when the company first purchased JAMS, but I was indirectly involved with the upgrade from version 7.2 and to 7.3. The upgrade process was extremely straightforward. Fortra's support provided a Wiki article to walk us through it. We backed up the files and performed the steps. You go through the installer to upgrade it.

I rate Fortra's JAMS a ten out of ten.

We have a student information system (SIS) for education. We have 50 school districts that run on the same database, and they all can run reports through the GUI. JAMS manages the reports. We have a throttle so that they don't overpower the system. So, the stuff comes through the system and the throttle manages it, and then if there's a certain report that runs over, we can kill it. They can run it again with better parameters. That's pretty much the main use. We have a lot of nighttime jobs that we schedule through that as well.

It's deployed on our private cloud. We run our own server. In terms of its version, we're on the most recent version.

If JAMS has a deadlock, we get a notification. When there's a deadlock, it'll kill the job. If something runs too long, it kills it. We also have a throttle, which also helps the whole system to work. If we didn't have the throttle, it would be bedlam. It would be crazy. 

It absolutely helps to eliminate data slack across the applications. It'll kill jobs; it'll kill deadlocks faster; and it'll kill long-running queries. We can get in there, and where the software doesn't allow us to kill the job, we can get into the SQL Server, but JAMS is much cleaner, and more people can get into it without having to expose the database access to people. We can give them JAMS access where they can kill the job.

It saves time when troubleshooting stalled jobs because of the fact that more people can get into it without having the access to the backend. 

It has 100% helped to free up the IT staff’s time. Previously, there used to be two or three of us for monitoring, but now, we've boiled it down just to me. I get the notifications, and I handle them. It has absolutely reduced staff time.

The overall product is fantastic. I love it. It has been a fantastic, solid product. If I have one tiny bit of a problem with it, the support team gets in touch with me right away. I don't know if I've had another service that has been as fantastic as the JAMS support team. 

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. 

I have been using this solution for about 15 years.

It's 110% rock solid. JAMS has never failed us. It has been rock solid.

We only use it for one thing. I don't have any input on its scalability because we don't use it for anything else. We only use it on one platform. So, there's no centralization. We have one main application. It has the front end, the back end, the middleware, and all that jazz. All the jobs to maintain the software are run through JAMS.

We probably use the simplest features of JAMS. We have no complex code-driven things.

I would rate them a 10 out of 10. They get back to you faster than your mom will call you back. When we've had problems, such as if I've had a job that keeps on failing and then I say, "Here's the error code, and I don't know why it's failing," they're right back. They are fantastic. Although I haven't contacted them in probably a year, when we first started up, our software code was sketchy or a little weak, and it failed. JAMS was right there when we had problems with scheduling things. They were fantastic. Their support is amazing. The product is solid. It's as solid as it can be.

Positive

JAMS was our first and only one. I know they did a lot of research on it, and they picked JAMS. The whole state uses it. They picked it, and we didn't know. We didn't come from anybody, and we aren't going to anybody, that's for sure.

I've installed it many times. It's simple as a pie. With a few clicks, you are done. It gets done as fast as you can click. It's very simple. As long as you have all the parameters, a database, and your web front end, it's super easy.

Our licensing is pretty cheap because we have a state solution. So, we pay only $1,000 a year. 

We're a software provider for school systems. We are state-owned. There are 13 of us throughout Ohio, and we have a collective agreement with JAMS or a collective licensing through JAMS. Because we have so many licenses, we get a discount on the renewal, etc.

I would absolutely recommend it to anybody. If you don't give it a try, you're a fool. At least give it a try because you'll find that it's an easy install. It's an incredibly easy management tool to go around. The setup wizards are nice. It's a little slow on some of the history look-ups, and I don't know why. Other than that, it's very clean with a good front end and easy manageability.

In terms of helping us to be aware of and handle common issues that can prevent our jobs from running, we haven't had anything. It will kill a job if there's a deadlock, and obviously, we get notifications if there are bad parameters in the job run, but I don't have any notifications about not running because of permissions, low resources, or anything like that. We don't have that kind of thing set up.

I would easily rate it a 10 out of 10. With the stability and the support, to me, every day, it's a 10.

We use JAMS to run various tasks, such as nightly claims processing jobs. It's also helpful for moving files around and interfacing between the cloud and our on-prem systems. 

The company has 50 to 100 users, including admins, developers, and on-call maintenance staff. We also have reporting staff who monitor jobs to see if they are succeeding. 

JAMS enables us to formalize simple tasks, reducing the amount of manual work. We can package all the access needed for those tasks, so a non-expert can deal with a problem without disturbing people. It automated 100 percent of the functions that can be automated. It's the only scheduler we have. 

It's hard to quantify how much labor it replaced. It's more than 10 days annually but probably less than 100. It saves staff maybe a day every four weeks. JAMS has centralized management. It is a critical way we deal with multiple systems that interface.  

We have eliminated some tools. For example, we can use JAMS as a monitoring tool and use it in place of Enterprise Manager. Regarding time saved, JAMS saved about 15 to 20 percent compared to our previous scheduler. JAMS also costs less than our last system, significantly reducing operational overhead. 

JAMS handles complex schedules well enough. That's one of the main reasons we use it. We use JAMS to populate our data warehouse every night, ensuring the updated data is available every morning. Troubleshooting failed jobs in JAMS is straightforward. You can navigate the logs quickly, and it sends you an email pointing to the source of the problem. 

JAMS is easier to use and cheaper than our previous solution. The installation is more straightforward, and JAMS has a graphical user interface, so it's more accessible. The interactive processes are helpful. We don't use them often, but it's a nice feature to have.

It sends notifications to the person on-call when a job fails, but the failures rarely have anything to do with JAMS. It allows jobs to restart several times, which often resolves exceptions. I'm satisfied with how it handles exceptions. 

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.

We have used JAMS since 2014.

The current version of JAMS is stable. It's more stable than the previous version.

I rate Fortra's customer service a nine out of ten. 

Positive

Deploying JAMS is straightforward. During the initial deployment and migration from the old system, we had to request servers and plan to deploy the client. There were three stages: installation, migrating jobs from our old system, and testing. 

The migration wasn't automatic. We had to reenter most of the jobs from the previous system manually. We took the opportunity to redesign the tasks a little. It wasn't that difficult, and we had no problems replicating the functionality or anything like that. The migration took about six months.

There isn't much maintenance after deployment. We can upgrade to the latest version in two or three hours. 

JAMS is cheaper than our previous solution, and we can run it on any server. The license for our old solution was limited to two servers. JAMS reduced our expenditures by about half compared to the other solution. 

JAMS is much cheaper than our previous solution.

I rate Fortra's JAMS an eight out of ten. 

We have batch processes that run either on-demand or on a scheduled basis. JAMS is used to manage and run those jobs.

We have realized significant savings in manpower. There's no need for operators to be submitting jobs manually, as it is automated. And the ability to chain a whole bunch of sequences or steps, again, results in labor savings.

It gives us a single pane of glass that allows us to see what is going on and that centralizes the management of jobs on all our platforms. We use it both in a production and non-production environment. We're certainly getting a lot of benefits from that.

And data is ready to go when our users need it, due to the fact that it's scheduling jobs and running them as quickly as the backend systems allow.

Another advantage is that the monitor interface gives very good information, good visuals that are color-coded so that you can quickly jump to where an issue is. That helps save time when troubleshooting jobs. In terms of our IT staff's time, JAMS is probably saving us a few hours a day.

One of the things I like the most, as a SQL DBA, is the fact that we can manipulate tables in the background. Also, the fact that you can have your own views and work with the product the way it fits best is a very helpful feature.

There are alerts if things fail, and we do have that functionality in place. For critical jobs, we also have notification that the job has run successfully. And JAMS is very good at handling exceptions. You can do retries.

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.

I've been using Fortra's JAMS for five-plus years.

It's a stable product. We've rarely experienced bugs or glitches.

It's also a scalable solution.

We have it in extensive use. We have hundreds of jobs that run on a daily basis, both in production and non-production environments. There are no plans at this point to expand our use. There simply is no need to have more jobs running. That said, we are in the process of doing an upgrade from 6.5 to 7, but there is no increase in the number of jobs planned.

I was not at the organization when the initial setup happened. 

In terms of training, we do not have formal training for JAMS. For the operators, it is really a handoff. It is quite intuitive for them. For admins, there is obviously a lot more to the product.

We have definitely seen ROI. It's a great labor-saving tool. The hours that would be required to manually submit and monitor these jobs would be quite significant if we did not have an automation solution in place.

The way that we have it licensed is by the number of jobs. We have two installations and there probably could be a little bit more flexibility in terms of moving licenses between one and the other. However, our situation is that we have one that is a production license and another that is a non-production license, so that may be the issue.

We have five hands-on users of JAMS including two admins and three operators who monitor and release jobs on an as-needed basis. The admins are the ones involved in maintenance, not that they're necessarily needed for maintenance, but they are the ones capable of doing whatever needs to be done.

I would definitely recommend it. Note that there is a learning curve, so you should go in with a plan. But it is highly flexible and very valuable.

We have many batch jobs. JAMS really helps us schedule all the jobs and execute them one by one, or sometimes in parallel, on a daily basis.

We have two schedulers, a primary and a secondary, and we also have a few agent servers. All the jobs are scheduled on them to run.

JAMS helps save time when troubleshooting stalled jobs. Also, in the past, we tried different schedulers. We used to have agent jobs on SQL Server, and we used Windows Task Scheduler, but now we have just one tool. For troubleshooting and maintainability, I don't need to go to different places to find the answer. I just go to JAMS.

The scheduling and execution of jobs are the most valuable features. The scheduling is important because if there is a task we want to execute at 4:00 AM, there's no way we will have someone who can manually run the job. In addition, we execute 100 to 200 jobs per day, and manual intervention is not an option.

I can also set up a workflow that repeats, which is quite good. And if there's something wrong, it will send an email notification so that we can look into it.

Most of the jobs are very critical to our internal business operations. On one hand, they need to be executed, and on the other, they need to be completed within a certain timeframe. JAMS helps split jobs out to our different agents to complete. That's really helpful.

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.

I've been using JAMS for about three years.

In general, it's quite stable. I don't need to worry about it 99 percent of the time. And because we have an HA setup, it's quite reliable. 

The scalability is good. If I have, say, two agents at the moment but I think that's not enough, I can just purchase more licenses and it will support more agents. We currently have six agents.

When I have an issue that I don't know how to fix, I just send an email to them. They are very responsive and knowledgeable. They always fix the problem for me.

Positive

Before using JAMS we used Windows Task Scheduler, but it's not a high-availability setup. If that server is down, jobs won't get executed. With JAMS in place, if the primary scheduler is down, the secondary will pick up all the scheduling responsibility, so we don't need to worry. Even if it is an agent, the job will be executed on other agents.

We had a consultant onsite to help us set up, so it was okay. We migrated jobs from Windows Task Scheduler, or agent jobs, to JAMS. It was not time-consuming, but because we have a lot of jobs it's not like the migration happened within 30 minutes. It took some time, but the process was simple and straightforward.

There is a bit of a learning curve to JAMS. It's not like you install it and it will be up and running for you. You need to learn to use it properly. Otherwise, you may run into issues. We engaged a JAMS consultant who gave us some training. It was expensive, but it was quite useful.

It's expensive, it's not free, but it takes care of my concerns. That is a form of ROI.

It's expensive, to be honest, but it does the job.

I haven't used another scheduler in several years, but compared to the one I last used, JAMS is better. It's more reliable, and that is actually the most important thing.

JAMS' ability to handle exceptions is not the best, but it's good. Don't expect any tool to be perfect. You need to make sure your internal program works together with JAMS to deliver the best solution.

What my team needs are tools to reliably execute all the jobs, minimize the risks, and support high-availability. JAMS does the job.

We use JAMS for file transfer, but instead of using JAMS file transfer, we have a script, a CMD file, which we schedule and configure to use either WinSCP or Ipswitch WS_FTP Professional. It will use either of those to send and receive files. We use it for scheduling file transfers.

It's deployed on AWS.

JAMS saves us on the order of thousands of hours per year.

I can create new jobs and schedule them based on time, based on a file trigger, or based on an email trigger. I'm happy with all those abilities.

The interface is good, and it's very easy to define and create jobs. If a job is not running or there is an error, the solution will send an email. That's all very good and very useful.

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.

I've been using HelpSystems JAMS for more than a year now. I'm the only admin for PSEG.

I'm exploring JAMS as we go. I'm trying to find more time so that I can explore all the other options it has, such as SAP connectors, so that I can suggest solutions we can use.

We have used their tech support a few times and they were very good each time. They were very responsive and very quick.

Positive

This solution replaced another tool we had before, called Apps15, which crashed one day. We migrated whatever we were doing there, all the CMD scripts, to this. Once we switched, we liked it and it has become one of our very important utilities for all the file transfers between our company and its vendors. We use it for multiple file transfers every day, whenever there is a financial transaction with many files created by SAP and other applications.

It saves us time and it is not an expensive solution for what we are doing. 

Maybe in the future, when we integrate with SAP and other tools, it might be a little costly, but it's still a very cost-effective solution. It's very good.

There is an application called Maestro, but that is built into SAP. In comparison, this is a comparatively very simple and smooth application that takes less time to configure. Maestro and XI are for internal transfers only, while JAMS is the main, approved solution for doing external file transfers. It is our enterprise file transfer tool.

It's a nice tool for scheduling, but make sure you are familiar with all the connectors. It can connect to and integrate with multiple applications. We have the SAP Job Scheduling Service doing its work, but JAMS can also do the SAP portion. Instead of having multiple tools, if you look at all the features that JAMS has, it might be able to replace the other tools so that you just use one.

It's a very good solution. Even my director was very happy with it.

We used it for scheduling our jobs. Our jobs were set up on different servers, which made the maintenance very difficult, and the main reason we switched over to JAMS was that we could have all our jobs from different servers in one single place. Secondly, we had many workflows that had to be triggered automatically, and JAMS was pretty much the tool that we wanted. We found it very useful to do workflow scheduling. 

JAMS provided all the audit trails. When a job failed, we looked into those trails and then went ahead and fixed those jobs right away to avoid future failures. There were many reasons for failures. Sometimes, it failed to connect to our Microsoft Exchange Server. At certain times, there used to be connectivity issues with our Microsoft Exchange Server. We changed the timing of the job accordingly so that there was not much business impact. That was one of the most common issues that we faced. The other issue was when a file was not received, and it was waiting for a prerequisite to be met. With the email feature that JAMS has, we made sure a proper notification email was sent to the right system instantly so that if a file is not received, the job does not fail. We had set up two hours of time for the job to wait for the file to arrive. That was a very good feature that we did not find in the other scheduling tools that we used.

JAMS saved time when troubleshooting stalled jobs. Because of its audit trail, we could directly go into the error log and see where the error was. With the email notification that we used to get for the failed jobs, the error used to be there as an attachment error log. In case we were not able to log into the JAMS system, we could directly open the log and find the error.

JAMS helped centralize the management of jobs on all the platforms and applications. We previously had different servers, and the maintenance was hard. Some jobs were on SSI servers, and some were on the Windows server. We also had jobs on other servers. We had at least four different servers. Everything was pretty disjointed, and this was our key use case to switch over to JAMS.

It's a full-featured job scheduling tool. The part that I liked the best was the support team. This tool was new, and we were all learning it and setting up the different jobs that were complex in nature. Their support team was very responsive in helping us out through the setup and resolving the issues. They have been incredibly awesome.

The email notification that we received was also valuable. I liked that part because if there was any job that failed, it was good that we were notified instantly. That's one part that we liked. Also, we had to run multiple interfaces on the JAMS server, and we were able to do that very easily.

It's the best tool to schedule jobs. It's super easy and super transparent. Once you know how to set up a job, you can easily train the users. It provides excellent visibility if something fails. 

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.

We used it for almost two years. 

It's very stable.

Customer support was the best part of JAMS. When we needed instant help, especially when something in production failed, their support team was excellent. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We had separate systems for scheduling. We did not have a single centralized solution, and that's why we went for JAMS, but now, we have moved to a different platform, which has an in-built scheduling system. The usage of JAMS is very limited now. Our IT team uses it, and I use it when there is a failure and I get notified.

We evaluated a couple more schedulers, but JAMS received the highest score overall. That was the reason why we went ahead with it. We did the initial feasibility and analysis of various different tools. There were about three solutions that were short-listed, and out of those, JAMS made it.

We are not using JAMS much now because of the new platform, but based on the time for which we used it, I would definitely recommend it to others. We were pretty impressed with it because we were not sure how much to expect from this job scheduler. We were very happy with it.

It's definitely something that we can vouch for. It's an easy-to-use tool, and it's full-featured. There are so many other features that were shown to us during the demo. We didn't use all of them, but it does come with a whole lot of features. It's very stable. 

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten.

It is our enterprise job scheduler. Every batch job that runs in the company runs on JAMS. 

It helps save time when troubleshooting stalled jobs. It has full logging. You go into your single pane of glass, you see all your failed jobs, you click on the job, go straight to the log, and you see what has gone wrong. And if something fails in the middle of the night, with the targeted alerting it sends an email or an SMS and does all your on-call for you. We've been using it for so long that it's hard to say how much time it saves us. But it's probably fair to say it quite easily saved us a day a week, and even more. The time saved could easily be the equivalent of one FTE. And that, of course, allows that FTE to do other work that's beneficial to the company.

One of the most valuable features is the natural language selection. That means that when you are scheduling a job, you've got more flexibility than anything else I've ever come across in the industry. You can not only tell it to run something daily or on a specify a day of the week, but you can specify "the first Monday of the month," or "the second workday of the month," or "the second business day of the month," or "the last business day of the month," or "every other Tuesday." The flexibility in the scheduling is because of JAMS' natural language selection. It's better than anything else on the market that I've seen.

The ability to change jobs is the stock standard for a job scheduler, but JAMS has the ability to allocate resources. We mainly use that at a global level. If we are doing scheduled maintenance, for example, we can halt all jobs. We can set the resource level to zero and no jobs will run. That way, we don't have to go through turning off schedules. For maintenance windows, it makes life an absolute breeze.

The alerting in it is really targeted. You can set a hierarchy of jobs if you like. There is a global level, obviously. But underneath that, you can have folders. We set up those folders at a functional level within the business. For instance, we have a folder for our finance jobs, another for our compliance jobs, and another folder for our equities jobs. At that folder level, you can set specific alerting so that if jobs in a given folder fail, certain people are alerted. You can also set security at the folder level, so that only people in those areas can go set them. That means that the alerting and security can be set at a very granular level.

Another great feature is the full auditing capability. If anyone makes a change to a job, you can see who's changed it and when. That full auditing capability is huge for compliance. And you've got version control, as well. If you make a change to a job and it fails, all you have to do is revert back to the previous version and you're back in business.

In addition, it's built on .NET. If you're a Microsoft shop, PowerShell is exposed natively and seamlessly integrates with it, which is brilliant. We use an awful lot of PowerShell in our organization because we're a Microsoft shop.

But it can run agents on any operating system and it can run all types of jobs. The execution methods it has are amazing. It can run stored procedures, SQL Agent jobs, SSIS packages, batch jobs, Linux jobs, and Oracle. The number of execution methods is huge and it runs just about any type of job you would want to run, and on any platform, which is also huge.

JAMS is also very intuitive and easy to use. It doesn't take a lot of work to set up and get started with it. It integrates natively with Windows Workflow Foundation, so you can build quite complex workflows, with if-then-else structures, and you can run things in parallel or in sequence. It really is a very feature-rich product but it's also very easy to use.

In addition, it helps centralize the management of all jobs and all your platforms and applications. You have a single pane of glass where you're looking at everything. If your organization is big, you might have multiple administrators. In that case, you set security at whatever level you like and certain people can only look at certain jobs. In my case, because I'm effectively the administrator of it in our organization, I see everything. But that one pane of glass for a whole organization is its great strength.

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.

I have been using JAMS since 2009. I was the first in the Australasian region to implement it. We're currently using version 6.5, but we're in the process of upgrading to 7.3.

The stability is really good. They do have a failover solution, which we're not using. We are just using the standalone, with a single server, but with no problems at all. We have never missed a beat.

We haven't had a problem scaling up. We have over 2,000 individual jobs, and we run 25,000 instances of those jobs every day. We plan to increase our usage as this is the only solution that runs jobs in our company.

All of IT uses it to schedule our jobs. And because of the security aspects, we make ad hoc jobs available to end-users as well. They can go in and all they're able to see, and run, only their ad hoc job. So about 50 out of the 350 people in our organization are using it.

The support is terrific. I've been working with these guys for 12 years and, as often as not, they've come across every problem that I've come across. I'll say, "Oh, listen, I've got this problem," and they'll say, "Here's a piece of code you can run. Here's an example where one of our other clients has done it before and we helped them do it." The support is brilliant; really good.

Positive

When I started with this company, they didn't have JAMS. Because I'd used it at a different company, the first thing I did when I got here was to say, "We're putting this in," and they did. They were running jobs via SQL Agent, as well as Windows Tasks Scheduler, SQL Server Reporting Services schedule, via Linux cron, and someone had even built an in-house job scheduler. Back then, when a job failed, remediating it was an absolute nightmare because nothing was synchronized. There were no dependencies on any of the jobs.

All the monitoring was done manually before, in our organization. Any company of a certain size should have an enterprise job scheduler. If you don't, you're just kidding yourself. You are making a rod for your own back, because someone has to monitor things, whether it's SQL Agent or Window Task Scheduler, to make sure the jobs are all working properly. Because it was manual, things would get missed and it was a nightmare.

The initial setup of JAMS was very straightforward. It was really good and their support staff was terrific in helping with that as well.

You get it up and running in a day, if you've got your servers built. It's a matter of provisioning a server, making sure you've got your service account set up, database ready to go or your database server provisioned. As long as you've got all the bits and pieces, you could be up and running in an hour, really.

ROI is hard to quantify. But whereas in the past we might have had one or more people monitoring batches and remediating failed batches, JAMS does all that now. It frees up one or two people. It's been an absolute no-brainer for us. It's worth its weight in gold and we cannot get rid of it now.

There was a price hike recently, which makes it a lot more expensive than what we are currently paying for it. You can do an enterprise license, which is probably the best value. But it's certainly a lot cheaper than Tivoli and Control-M. In comparison to them, you get a lot more bang for your buck. You get pretty much the whole functionality and more, in some cases, when compared to Control-M, but at a fraction of the price.

Before coming across JAMS, I had worked in bigger organizations that used Tivoli and Control-M. They are what I would call your "Tier One" solutions. Very big companies use them, although I don't know why they do, given that they're super expensive. Both of them are very feature-rich products, but in addition to being very expensive, they're very complex to set up. They also require a very heavy touch to maintain and administer. JAMS is easier to set up, much cheaper, and much easier to administer. 

There's another product called ActiveBatch, which is what I would call "Tier Two," because it's not as expensive as Tivoli and Control-M. ActiveBatch is in the same category as JAMS, price-wise. It has a nice drag-and-drop interface, which is something that JAMS doesn't have, but it's a lot more complex to use and not as intuitive.

Give it a go. Compare it to everything else on the market and, in terms of bang for your buck and the features you get, I would be very surprised if anything even comes close to JAMS.

You put an agent on every box that you want to run a job on. It's not agentless. But, as I said, you can put an agent on a Linux box or a Windows box or whatever other type of box you have and run jobs on any type of OS.

JAMS stays well ahead of the curve. I've been using it for 12 years and I still love it. I've recommended it at every company I've worked for.