Jenkins Reviews

The simplicity of Jenkins and the evolving ecosystem of Jenkins are most valuable. Today, you do not have to write a pipeline from scratch. The library functionality of Jenkins helps you to bring all those in ready-made, and you also get the best practices for them. That is a great feature of Jenkins, and that is why it is being used significantly.

Jenkins also helps you to be agnostic to cloud providers.

I would like to have an integrated dashboard on top of it and a better UX to look at. The dashboard could be better in terms of integration with other tools. We should be able to have a single pane of glass across all the tools that we use where Jenkins is the pipeline. This can be a very good upgrade to it.

I have been using this solution for about 10 years.

It is very stable.

It is highly scalable, and it can scale into different models.

In terms of its customers, I have worked with very big enterprises to small companies with about 100 people.

Jenkins is an open-source initiative. So, the support is more community-based. The community is great. I do not remember asking for help often because it is quite stable, but for any extensibility that can be built on it, the community is great. You can find lots of resources and helpful people.

It is definitely not complex. It might not be very easy for a newcomer, but it is in the easy to medium range to get started with.

As people are using it, they should come to the community and provide their input so that the community can grow better.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

I'm using Jenkins for CI/CD pipelines. We have around 400 dashboards and BI applications that need to be deployed when we make changes and push it all out on GitHub. 

I create webhooks from GitHub to trigger the Jenkins pipeline, which runs a script that I'm writing in Python. This deploys the applications to their respective application servers.

Jenkins allows us to automate deployment, so I no longer have to do it manually. That's the primary use case. The other advantage of Jenkins is that it's open source. It was free for me to download and install. It's a product that's been in use for many years, so I can find a lot of support online for any issues that I may encounter while configuring anything for a given use case.

I like that Jenkins integrates seamlessly with GitHub, and it's able to clone a lot of repositories. There is also a workflow sequence where I can write my script so that it goes through a particular workflow channel and all the scripts run. 

Jenkins offers many environment variables, allowing me to customize it and deploy in various environments without too many changes to the record. It's fairly sophisticated in that sense.

Many of the Jenkins servers I install are on a system in some restricted zone where the server doesn't have internet access. This is problematic because Jenkins requires many plugins to integrate with GitHub or add custom functions, so it would be helpful if the plugins were pre-installed with the product.

Installing them online is easier because I can go ahead and search for the plugins I need. However, I have to download every plugin when I'm using this tool on a server in a high-security zone with no internet access. Each plugin depends on another, so the plugins have to be installed in a particular order, or installing all the plugins is extremely difficult. If the prerequisite is not installed, and I install the other one, it goes out and gives me an error. It's a complicated process to do it.

When this tool does not satisfy a particular requirement, I map the requirement to some other tool and proceed with it. There are different tools for various use cases, so I use whatever I have. I don't expect a single product to provide all the functionalities I need.

I've been working on Jenkins for about a year.

If there isn't any problem with the server where Jenkins is installed, I don't have any issues with Jenkins. We have had to restart it a few times to free up memory, but we run it on a multi-node cluster. That helps because we can redirect traffic through one of the servers while we restart the other. Some minor restarts need to be done to free up memory, but we have redundancy in place so it doesn't affect the system availability.

Jenkins' scalability is good because we can connect it to as many repositories as possible. I can create a hierarchy of jobs and set up a proper workflow to trigger the jobs in sequence. One level of the hierarchy is the build steps, and on top of those, we have hierarchy of jobs. Each job can trigger another job as well.

We use Jenkins throughout the entire organization to deploy a lot of applications. Every software development team in my organization uses Jenkins. Our developers have standardized the process and created another tool on top of the Jenkins server. 

We primarily use community support. Jenkins is widely used, so the community knowledge base is very rich. For any given question we have, the chances are good that someone has been asked it a couple of years ago, and it has already been answered well. We only need to recreate the solution online. Support is extensive.

Google provides a service similar to Jenkins called Cloud Build, but we'd have to purchase it because it's not open source. And since it's provided a GCP service, it's on the cloud. Most of the features that Jenkins offers is are available GCP. However, the server infrastructure is managed by GCP, so we don't have the flexibility to configure and change many things about the way the system works. 

There is a set of features available to us, and we can put some parameters in place to make it work. But the problem is that Cloud Build isn't very flexible in terms of its configuration. We have the same issue with AWS CodeDeploy, another service like Jenkins.

Most of the configurations we do have already been set by the cloud provider. Let's say Jenkins asks us to configure five to 10 things, and the cloud provider only asks us to configure one or two. Again, the problem is we do not have the option to customize. 

What's more, GCP or AWS services for CI/CD pipelines are tied to the other services in the cloud. For example, AWS has its own source control system called as CodeCommit. CodeDeploy is connected to it and another service called Pipeline.

You can fluidly orchestrate code with minimal administration or configuration. All changes you make on CodeCommit go through the workflow by just inputting the scripts. You don't have to do a lot of configuration like you need to do in Jenkins. AWS takes care of all of that. You can put some approval process to see if the build has succeeded. You need someone to go in and approve it before it's deployed. All those things can be done that aren't possible in Jenkins.

If I'm installing Jenkins on Windows, it's a simple graphical user interface similar to any installer. I only have to specify the port where this needs to be installed to open it and then configure the login. It's not intuitive to figure out what needs to be done because Jenkins is open source. As soon as we install it, it outputs some text file to one of the folders where Jenkins has been installed, and we generally don't have an idea of where that file will be.

That's the kind of thing you have to figure out using community support. I go to that file, find the temporary password, and set the login credentials. After the installation, I access the specific port where the server was installed via a local host. Then I log in to the Jenkins server and start configuring all the necessary elements I want in my deployment process.

The initial setup takes about 15 to 20 minutes, but I sometimes face a bottleneck when installing the plugins on an offline machine. Mapping the dependencies and then installing the correct sequence of dependencies is a nightmare, and it took me two days to do it. However, it generally takes only a day to get it completely configured.

Sometimes the batch scripts or any scripts we put in place might be a version that Jenkins doesn't support. We either have to make sure our scripts are compatible with the Jenkins version or update Jenkins. That sort has happened, but it's rare. Maybe it's because I've only worked on Jenkins for a year, and I haven't seen a lot of difficulties over there. I think there should be some maintenance, but from my experience, I've found it to be very minimal.

Jenkins is completely open source. 

I'd rate Jenkins about six out of 10 because it doesn't have much out-of-the-box integration. Everything needs to be done manually. On the other hand, it's free, so that makes up for the shortcomings. It depends on an organization's needs and budget requirements because it's not something I pay for.

I would recommend it for certain use cases. It depends upon the project. For example, Jenkins might be suitable for a client who doesn't use a cloud provider to deploy their CI/CD pipelines, and they're deploying on their on-prem system. Also, if they're in their POC phase and are unsure how much budget will be allocated to the project, I definitely recommend Jenkins to be their first-go solution for a CI/CD pipeline.

We use Jenkins for building our applications, deploying our applications, and some automation tasks.

We are using the open-source version and there is a lot of plugins and features that are available and it works on agents for free. In other solutions, it will cost extra to use them with the agent.

The UI of Jenkins could improve.

I have been using Jenkins for approximately six years.

Jenkins is stable. It provides all the required features for stability, such as backups.

Jenkins is scalable because it is open source and it integrates with other third-party vendor tools which are currently in the market, such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS. It gets very well integrated with all the new tools, it doesn't remain isolated.

We have multiple projects that are using this solution and each project has multiple users. In one project we could have 50 users or in another 10 users are using it.

We didn't face any issues to escalate to Jenkins for technical help.

We have previously used Bamboo. I use both Jenkins and Bamboo per our project requirements. Jenkins is more suitable for commercial projects and is more scalable and flexible as compared to other tools because its core focus is on integrating and updating automatically.

The initial setup of Jenkins was straightforward. It's very lightweight and it only requires Java on your system as a requirement.

We did the implementation of the solution ourselves with our team.

We are using the free version of Jenkins. There is not a license required to use the solution because it is open-source.

My advice to others is to explore Jenkins well and it is integrated with the scripting site. Teams should explore the scripting part of the Jenkins because everybody's nowadays is writing pipeline as a code for automating their operations. They should try to utilize the new feature provided to them, such as pipeline as a code. 

It does not matter what solution they are using, such as Microsoft Azure DevOps or Amazon AWS DevOps, Jenkins will integrate with other solutions. They should try and use Jenkins even if they're using some other tool.

I rate Jenkins an eight out of ten.

I use Jenkins for the continuous integration and continuous delivery phases of my pipeline. For the continuous integration part, we use GitHub with Webhook. If we have a development environment and the developer pushes anything, Jenkins will trigger the job right away. But if it is going to stage all the production environments, then Jenkins will start the job, and the developer will create a pull request. 

We can see that the test cases have passed, and the GitHub branch is ready to be merged into the feature branch. And for the continuous delivery pipeline, we are pushing things ourselves through Helm. So whenever we have to deploy something, we have created or developed our stages, through which we use Helm charts and deploy our solution.

Since we are using microservice architecture, most of our infrastructure is Kubernetes-based, which means we use docker containers inside that and cloud environments to spin up our solutions quickly. Jenkins is running inside Kubernetes, and Jenkins has some hooks attached to it. And with the plugins attached, you can spin up the container on the go whenever we have to build a job. And when the job is complete, the container is deleted. It's not like we have some node in Jenkins. The architecture comprises a master and a slave node, and you can run jobs on the slave node.

Our slave nodes work under both containers, which we are only spinning up when we need. And when we are done, we are just stripping them out instead of having our virtual machines running all the time. That is an interesting aspect of this architecture for us. Microservices waste architecture, so we use Kubernetes infrastructure with containers to spin up our slave nodes and handle the workload or the computing.

We use Jenkins for everything. We want to empower developers to have the confidence to deploy their solutions themselves into production instead of asking us as an operations guide. Even if they have to create a repository in GitHub, we have scripts behind Jenkins that can go ahead and make these for them. It's a core component of our development pipelines and developers' lives in our organization.

We used to have around 30 to 40 services, which we had to use in our microservices architecture. Now, when we have to deploy things due to the same code base, we have to write the same code every time and repeatedly in the Jenkins file. It's a monotonous job, and we cannot innovate. We are just copy-pasting the Jenkins file and only changing a few things in it. That wasn't the kind of DevOps experience we want. We want some customization instead of a mundane task. But there is an option in Jenkins called Jenkins Shared Library, where we can write our own group code. Now we are using it like a programming language in the Jenkins file.

We only have to call the object and inside that object, we have to call the function or methods we want. Our Jenkins files, which were previously 309 lines were reduced to 220 or 230 lines by only calling the objects and the specific parameters. If I want Java, I will provide Java, so it is going to call the specific stage, defining my library for Java-based code. If it is NTM, it is going to call the different libraries along with the right tools for load-based applications and testing. That was a satisfying experience. As a DevOps team, we spent a lot of time creating good value in the pipeline stream instead of spending all our time copy-pasting the Jenkins file. 

The most valuable aspect of Jenkins is pipeline customization. Jenkins provides a declarative pipeline as well as a scripted pipeline. The scripted pipeline uses a programming language. You can customize it to your needs, so we use Jenkins because other solutions like Travis and Spinnaker don't allow much customization. We can only use the declarative pipelines they provide. 

We can use Jenkins through the GUI and create customized methods. Its GUI is just like Java, so we can make our classes and define our custom methodologies. We can do whatever we want and customize as much as we wish to in any programming language. 

Jenkins is a Java-based solution, and it's a hassle to initially spin up the solution in Java. Jenkins is highly customizable through plugins, but it has limited out-of-the-box capabilities. We have to take advantage of the community configurations available to us. 

And I don't care too much for the Jenkins user interface. It's not that user-friendly compared to other solutions available right now. It's not a great user experience. You can do just fine if you are a techie, but it would take a novice some time to learn it and get things done. 

I used Jenkins extensively this whole year. Prior to that, I was using it for consolidation stuff, but this year I have used it extensively for both installations and DevOps pipelines.

There have been no crashes. I would say that the only important thing is downtime. Since it is a double application, the reboot takes a long time. It would be nice if it took less time to boot. Sometimes it takes around 5 to 10 minutes to boot with all the plugins. It would be great to reduce the maintenance time so that the developers don't even notice when it has been updated. But when we update, we need to announce downtime for that.

We have a master node, and the slave nodes are containers, so it's quite robust and scalable with that plugin for us. Even if we have a lot of jobs running at one time — sometimes it's 30 to 50 jobs running — it's cloud infrastructure. It's going to spin up automatically. The nodes are auto-scaling for the Kubernetes, and you can spin up containers on top of that, so it's quite scalable for us.

We haven't needed Jenkins support yet. 

The initial configuration with Kubernetes is a little bit clunky. Maybe we don't know how to do it because things are ever-evolving, or perhaps there is a right way that we do not know right now. This is one of the pain points. If I have to update my cluster, or there is some disaster recovery mechanism, or I have to add something in the configurations, there is no out-of-the-box tool available in Jenkins.

If I'm going to change my configurations in the conflict maps, it will not reload by itself. I have to add another sidecar container, which always looks for my configuration change updates and adds it into Jenkins. That was my pain point, and that is the same in the initial configuration part that you have to figure out. Jenkins cannot provide you with something out of the box for continuous change and updates. You have to use some third-party plugins for the sidecar containers.

The initial deployment was relatively easy because we used the UI to configure everything. Then there is one part of the configuration code in Jenkins where we have to take the configuration and put it in the conflict map. Whenever we have to change something, we only need to change the configuration map. And it reloads that part. 

The code portion of the configuration is very lengthy, and it isn't easy to figure out what should go into the configuration and what is unnecessary. There is a lot of junk in that. This is not good for the developers to put in their configuration size, but that was their end. Figuring that out takes time. That said, it's a one-person job. You don't need too many people if you know what you are doing.

After installation, Jenkins requires some maintenance, like backup and configurations. If there are some security breaches, Jenkins sends out notifications that you need to update these plugins because there were some security flaws. Sometimes we have to reboot Jenkins to apply these updates, which requires some downtime. Most plugins don't need a reboot, but we have to reboot Jenkins if it involves some core components.

We used the free version. We didn't need anything specific on the support side for that. It's totally customizable, and if you get so much good out of an open-source project, then you don't need to go for any support model. That was quite good, and community support has been good enough for us.

I looked into Travis, and I was primarily looking for customization. Travis wasn't as customizable as Jenkins.

I would rate Jenkins between seven and eight because I'm not that much of a GUI user, so I can use it. And if I have my configurations in place, I don't have to go inside and look at the UI again. It's a good solution for us. 

My primary use case is as a CI pipeline in order to deploy onto the GCP. This allows us to push any changes into the master brand.

The major benefit of using Jenkins is that it's a very secure way of deploying something to the cloud. It has also improved the drawbacks of manual deployments by making them more robust and secure, and it helps the user avoid mistakes because all the checks are there in one script which can be used every time.

The most valuable feature of Jenkins is the logs it provides - these are very helpful in understanding error conditions so we can see where the problem lies and go in and check it. Another useful feature is the GUI, which estimates how long a particular model will need to be executed. It's also very easy to understand for newcomers. 

One area for improvement would be the UI, which currently looks quite outdated and requires the user to go through too many steps. In the next release, I would like to have the ability to use the command prompt to navigate between repositories and to enable features.

There are some minor bugs with this solution, but overall the stability is ok.

Jenkins is very scalable.

The initial deployment is easy if you are familiar with script creation - a person who is unfamiliar with this might have difficulties with setup. It can be set up by a single person in four to five hours.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten.

Our main use cases are for restarting applications and monitoring system health. We instal the solution for companies and once it's up and running, we do all the health checks. We are customers of Jenkins and I'm a DevOps engineer. 

Jenkins has helped us to become more efficient and saves us a lot of time.

The solution is an integration tool and that is its value; we are able to integrate a lot of tools, whether it's Nexus for building automation, for plugins or repositories. This is what makes it a powerful tool. The most beneficial thing is being able to do everything with just one click, which was not possible previously when any changes needed to be carried out manually. Jenkins enables you to log in to multiple servers and it runs automatically on all your servers. 

I'd like to see some more features for scriptwriting and a more user-friendly UI for creating pipelines.

I've been using this solution for five years. 

We haven't had any problems with stability, even when we're running multiple builds. We use the product on a daily basis and although it doesn't require maintenance, there are some regular activities carried out by Jenkins every few months. 

If you're deploying on-premise, then scalability requires introducing new nodes and deploying application instances on two servers. We have multiple teams and they all have access to Jenkins so we currently have around 60 to 70 users.

We haven't had any problems with customer support. 

Our implementation process depends on what type of deployment is needed. If it's a very small chain and the deployment process is not complex, steps will be limited. If it's a larger implementation, more steps are involved and it becomes more complex. When needed, we have a networks team and a database team. For a small build, deployment can take 15 minutes. For a more complex build that has a lot of changes, it can take several hours.

It's important to know your requirements before implementing Jenkins. It's a good tool for integration and automation in an organization.

I rate the solution eight out of 10. 

We primarily use the solution as a build automation tool.

If we have to do some automation, we have to deploy the code on a server, and on the production server, so we can create a Jenkins pipeline, which we can call from Jenkins itself. Therefore, whenever we want to deploy the code on a server, on the production server, we use the Jenkins pipeline.

Within the organization, we have to manage nine applications as DevOps engineers. My expertise is in Unix, so whenever they need any Unix-related help, I'm on it. Okay. For all the nine teams I have to maintain their tasks. It is up to me and I can use Jenkins, Ansible, et cetera. 

From a deployment perspective, we don't require any passwords or any permissions and all. Everything we can do from Jenkins.

Whenever something fails, so we have the facility to check the logs. Based on that, we can find the solutions and we can fix things.

The initial setup is simple.

The stability of Jenkins is good.

The dashboards are very good.

The solution has been very easy to use.

We have found that the solution offers very good, very clear documentation. Everything is laid out well and easy to explain to a new user.

There are some 13 commands that we cannot run for Jenkins. For those particular commands, for the smallest small command (not the bigger task at a deeper level), for example, a copy command, we cannot run it from Jenkins. We cannot change the ownership of any directory or file or any kind of directory. In that case, we have a dependency on, for example, Ansible. There are some limited commands in Jenkins. 

I joined this current organization in November of 2019. From November 2019 onwards, I've been using this. It's been approximately two years at this point.

The solution has been very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. it doesn't crash or freeze. 

In some cases, it is a very reliable solution and tool. We had some dependencies, however, we have another solution for those dependencies. Whenever we do not have any dependencies somewhere else, we can use Jenkins.

I've never attempted to scale Jenkins.

My team has nine applications. Our organization has between 250 to 300 people. Many people are using the product. I'm not sure how many teams we have, however, I am sure that all the teams are using Jenkins.

I don't directly deal with technical support. Typically, I create a ticket, however, usually,  I try troubleshooting from my end. If the issue is not from our end, we have to raise a GR ticket and it takes approximately 24 to 48 hours to get it resolved, or for them to actually get in touch with us. 

In my company, we also have a Sharepoint that contains troubleshooting documentation that is quite helpful.

I was previously using Ansible.

The solution offers easy deployment. We just need to follow some steps and we have to give some URL paths and that's all. It's not time-consuming.

Initially, we do the setup for a particular or one particular task. If whenever we get a request in the future and based on the task, we just make a copy of that initial task and we do the minor changes and in that way, we can implement new tasks very easily.

We have a Jenkins central team. Whenever they upgrade, they send us a notification. A separate team handles the upgrade.

We are able to implement the solution for our clients.

I understand that the licensing is renewed about once a year. The pricing itself is fine. I wouldn't describe it as being overly expensive.

I'm not sure which version of the solution I'm using.

I'm just using this tool to automate items for my teams. Whenever my team requires my help, I support them.

I would recommend the solution to other users and organizations, however, it depends on the requirement and what exactly the users need. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

I'm a software engineer at a large bank. 

Jenkins increases our performance efficiency and saves us a significant amount of time.

We were initially SQL-based until we moved to object-oriented language and started hosting our code on Jenkins. The main benefit for us is the automation and we've done it in such a way that you only need to run one build that triggers itself and the rest of the builds downstream. We're moving most of our builds over to Jenkins because of all the automation it offers. It has a good interface, is reliable, and saves time. 

I think the logs could be improved so that anyone using the build for the first time gets a better view as to how it's performing, what the data is, and what processing is occurring. I'd like to see errors displayed differently. It currently takes an effort to find out where an error is and I think the error message and logging which is not jargon-based, is something I would like to see included.

I've been using this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution. We are a team of 25 people, all working with Jenkins in some way or other, whether it's the finance data adapter or the magnet platform, which is totally Java-based and uses Jenkins. We have mainly software engineers and a few business analysts on the team. We also have a maintenance team that deals with any issues that come up.

I have tried the partial plugin for Jenkins which we use for regression and analysis and it works well. 

Our technical support is all in-house. All software deployment information is available online and it's pretty easy to follow. 

We have a license contract with Jenkins. 

Jenkins is a great solution if you're looking at automation because it reduces manual work and improves performance. If you deploy it on cloud, then performance is improved further. It's worth reducing dependency by targeting a one-build solution for Jenkins. 

I rate the solution eight out of 10. 

There are many use cases for Jenkins. We have an AWS infrastructure in which we have created templates for the provisioning of the infrastructure, and for the infrastructure network appliance, we use Jenkins.

For the builds, we use Docker images, Maven, Gradle, and other builds. We send all the build environments to the Artifactory Servers running Jenkins. 

For any deployments to the systems, such as any standalone machines, Kubernetes cluster, or Auto Scaling groups, we use the Jenkins. 

If a Kubernetes cluster is ready and you want to have other external configurations we use Jenkins for all of the configuration setups.

Jenkins can be used to check vulnerabilities of any system or Docker images.

The most valuable features I have found are it can integrate other services as a plugin. For example, if you want to integrate GitHub, or third-party tools, such as Prisma scan, you can have them as plugins and you start using them. 

Jenkins can be used for elastic management, if you have any sensitive data or credentials you can use them across the environment. Additionally, the solution is easy to use and can be used across multiple use cases.

The solution could improve by having more advanced integrations.

I have been using Jenkins for approximately four years.

The solution is stable. However, if you have any network interruption or any server failure it will not be stable.

I have used the stand-alone Jenkins systems and I have other slaves configured with different systems or Docker containers and it has been operating well.

The scalable depends on the environment, if you want to have scalability it is possible. However, if there was a specific option to scale Jenkins systems it would be great.

We have approximately 250 users using this solution.

I have not used the technical support from Jenkins but I have used the online forums which have been helpful in answering questions.

I have previously used GitLab and Azure DevOps tools. I have found them both to be more complicated than Jenkins and this is why I switched. I am more familiar with Jenkins and this is another factor of why I use it.

The installation is straightforward. All you have to do is update your repository and then install it. There are certain configurations needed after the installation, such as providing the secret key, accessing the server, managing the user access for separate groups, for example, development, performance, and QA groups all need different access levels assigned. It does not take more than 10 minutes.

We did the implementation ourselves. Additionally, we can create scripts to do the configurations, this reduces the time needed for us to do them individually.

I am a DevOps engineer and we configure or automate deployments, schedule deployments, and then giving access to certain teams, such as the QA teams. They login in the morning and then if they want any new deployments, they can get it done. 

There is a development team to a certain environment, such as test environments, where they can test their code. They have a particular job and can do the deployments by themselves.

Jenkins is a free open-source server.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Jenkins a nine out of ten.

This solution is open source and we use it for the entire bill pipeline - for building different languages, for running reports on code coverage, running our QA tests, automated tests, and for deployment. We are customers of Jenkins and I'm head of infrastructure. 

The advantage of this product is that it brought automation to the company. Instead of manually billing, manually trying to run tests, it now happens automatically. 

The best thing about Jenkins is that it's such an open community, and it has a bazillion plugins which is a neat feature. Anything you want to do, someone else has probably already done it.

Despite there being a whole lot of community input on the solution, nobody is providing professional services around it. Jenkins itself is a very small company but it would be great if they could host and offer some kind of SaaS product which would provide an organizational structure of some sort.

I've been using this solution for 13 years. 

Stability is not top notch but it's pretty good. 

The solution is very scalable, I probably have around 60 people using it, mainly developers checking whether there are any errors. We have around 10, 15 QA people, power users, and  another 40, 45 developers looking at it. The solution is being extensively used but we only need one person to deal with maintenance. 

The initial setup was straightforward and didn't take too long, maybe a few days. Implementation was carried out in-house.

It's important to take the time to research the solution and find what's right for you. Since it's so customizable, there's a million ways to do things and since there's no professional services that says this is the right way, you have to figure it out on your own. Take that time, do the research, try things out. Make sure it works before you go ahead and put it into your whole organization. This solution touches the bases of everything we need to do. Professional services aren't there, but that's the only downside. Other than that, we're very happy with the product. 

I rate this solution a nine out of 10.