I feel that Stonebranch can be improved in certain areas. Since I have been a Control-M user for a very long time and have also used Dollar Universe in the past, creating a task or job and then creating a schedule with time triggers and other triggers in different objects feels a bit complicated compared to other tools in the market where everything is laid out in a single pane and scheduling is easy. Here, since we have a task and a time schedule and time trigger separately from the task, I am getting a bit confused becoming accustomed to those concepts, but that can be managed more easily.

The self-service automation access currently available in Stonebranch could benefit from added features. While it is already secure, introducing two-step authentication or multiple authentication methods such as SAML could enhance security further.

I would give Stonebranch a perfect score if there were no scope for improvement, but I believe there are still aspects of user experience and features that could be enhanced.

I think Stonebranch could be improved by creating a command line tool so that Mainframe teams can control everything without using a web browser. This would help us quickly address issues as Mainframe users are accustomed to the command line. If Stonebranch can send all failure alerts directly to Mainframe's SDSF screens, it would also help us debug faster and reduce our need to contact Stonebranch team repeatedly for any issues. Building automated templates that instantly recognize Mainframe data structures, known as copybooks, without requiring data engineers to manually set up fresh translation metadata arrays for every new inbound file type is another improvement I can recall.

Stonebranch reports have been disappointing, and I would appreciate it if they could have features where various tables of the database could be joined and provide the report, which can be pulled and shared across.

I believe Stonebranch can be improved by making it more modern in terms of adding new jobs, as the look and feel of the application is very basic and the UI can be improved.

What holds me back from rating it higher is that the UI could be much simpler. The menu options can be improved by putting a hamburger menu on the left-hand side to see all the services that are provided. It is often difficult to locate the service that you are looking for. They could add a search function for the services that we are looking for. For example, variables cannot be searched for directly. We have to fetch variables from the list that automatically comes on the screen. The UI needs improvement.

From an improvement perspective, since everything is moving towards the cloud and AI, the integrations with Stonebranch need to be accelerated. Stonebranch does provide SDKs for building our own integrations, but they need to enhance this further as the market evolves.

A few features we would like to see included in Stonebranch are improvements to reporting capabilities, specifically the ability to pull an entire workflow into a single report seamlessly. Stonebranch has mentioned they are developing a new solution called the reporting database to address these limitations.

Stonebranch can be improved due to an issue I had a few weeks ago with data leakage, as the servers consume more RAM than usual during continuous file transfers, and this utilization should be less.

For my purposes, I believe there is nothing that needs improvement because Stonebranch is good as it is, and for further improvements, I will need to check with the vendor.

Stonebranch can be improved by making it more familiar to other tech geeks. We can add various other features such as AI to improve its accessibility because in today's world, AI is more important than manual things. If it uses AI, it will be improved.

We can add a search bar in Stonebranch and enhance the searches, such as if we need to add more filters. The filtration options are very limited, so we can add more filter options so that we can search out any specific task or job very easily. Apart from that, an AI assistant will be very beneficial for the future.

Stonebranch is more expensive compared with GoAnywhere MFT because they provide many types of services, protocols, and broader features in their product. In a pricing scenario, they provide a task-based subscription. In GoAnywhere, we just have to pay for a one-year subscription for working. We can install many users in our MFT, meaning we can use many types of data to transfer from one side to another. There is no restriction. However, in Stonebranch, pricing matters are based per task. One file sent from one location to another means one task is completed. We have to calculate what our customer, based on their requirements, how many tasks they will do. After understanding this, we had to give it based on their requirements. Stonebranch works task-based, and they give subscriptions based on tasks.

Maintenance is required from Stonebranch. Stonebranch requires maintenance because they also provide upgrades, and there is also a case where support must be needed. Maintenance is provided by Stonebranch. Maintenance is needed from Stonebranch's side product because of upgrades, any new requirements from the customer side, and any new versioning or changes from Stonebranch also require maintenance. Maintenance is required from both Stonebranch's side and the customer side as well.

It can be hard to manage the task monitor. We are still working with the vendor, and we are trying to make the changes as per our requirements. We are asking them to build some new solutions so they can be helpful in the new releases in our organization.

In terms of the task monitor, we should not have to try to calculate how many hours back we have to check or monitor a job.

We'd like to have some sort of mobile app in the future. 

Stonebranch Universal Automation Center could improve the analytics.

It's not available on the cloud, so they should take that due to safety, security, and scalability.

There is room for improvement with its connectivity with the Microsoft SRS system. It is very weak. They keep telling us it works with it, and technically it does, but it does not provide a lot of visibility. We have lost a lot of visibility migrating to Stonebranch, compared with just running tasks on the SRS server. That's really about the only thing that is a sore point for us.

We don't really use the Stonebranch Marketplace. We looked at it earlier and management really wasn't impressed. So admin was told not to worry about it. It could be that if we were looking at it now, now that we're smarter, I think we would find things there. But we have gotten used to the way we're doing things now, so we don't want to rock the boat.

It can't handle negative written codes. 

If a program was providing a negative value, it wouldn't be able to handle it well.

There some issues with the conversions initially and with the initial simulations. These are areas that could be improved.

The product is very new to us still. Therefore, it's difficult to gauge if there's anything missing. We're still learning about the product as we go.

Lifecycle management.

The Universal Controller is decent for the money it costs. We host it on-promise - some local virtual servers. It still doesn't have all the features and functionality of our mainframe scheduler, but hopefully it will get there. It needs some work to have full features, compared to other products that are out there, specifically IBM's Workload Scheduler.

Also, regarding the Controller, there should be a much cleaner method of looking at dependencies between workflows. 

I would also like to see, when there is a workflow that's going to kick in at a certain date, the option to pick the time for those dates.

Usually, when there's something that I need from them, I put in a request for an enhancement. It typically takes a few months, but they deliver.

For instance, I have a request regarding our agent on the mainframe. It may time out when communicating to the Universal Controller, when the mainframe is extremely busy. That can cause a task which is running at that time to not see the results of the job that ran on the mainframe. It happens sporadically during times of really busy CPU usage. We're expecting that enhancement from them in the fourth quarter.

There is a component called the OMS, which is the message broker. We rely on infrastructure, resiliency, and availability for that piece. If that could change to be highly available just as a software component, so that we don't have to provide the high-available storage, etc. for it, that would be a plus. It would just be cheaper to run.

One hiccup we've had is due to the fact that we have other internal scheduling tools. We're able to talk to them, but we have trouble with some of the networking between them, so we're still trying to work out the kinks there.

Also, there's the z/OS agent. We've had troubles with GDGs, with recovery. Say we have a job that fails on a Saturday and there are other jobs that update that generation. If they go to fix the one from Friday, it picks up right where it left off. It doesn't know about the future generations that were created. We've been trying to have Stonebranch correct that for us, and that's probably the biggest open issue. And they're the hardest ones to install and upgrade. Mainframe, in general, seems to be a hurdle, in my opinion.

• FTP tasks have been an issue. 
• It has also been challenging to support PGP encryption which is a fairly standard encryption method.
  

For me, Stonebranch can do more than integration and scheduling, like real-time interfacing services and point-to-point to integration. With this, we don't want to invest money on multiple tools for different purposes.

More number of FAQs should be provided because I found it hard to configure when I started using this tool.

• Virtual resource priorities could be better.
• Maybe in the future, the use of queues.
• Promoting objects to multiple environments at once.

• Run in Unix and Windows environments
  

Additional features:

• Migration tool for encrypted username/password to use the new Keystore feature
• UDM third-party file transfer
• Enable proxy certificates for IBM System SSL.

• The API's need to fully meet the capabilities of the user interface.
• Better support of workload balancers (F5).

• A migration tool for encrypted username/password to use the new keystore feature.
• Enabling proxy certificates for IBM's System SSL would be great.

Dealing with customer requirements and enhancements. The process now is a little bit non-transparent. 

In my opinion, training materials and FAQ/support should be improved. For people who start using UAC in a DevOps model, it's hard to understand configuration and how UAC works, how to create workflows, etc. More online classes or tutorials. 

In my opinion, scheduler sometimes is getting turned off due to causes that Opswise was not predicted.

REST API can be improved by exposing more information about running instances. For example, the failed error message of a Stored procedure task cannot be seen through the API. Other features that would be helpful is to dynamically insert new tasks to be run at run time when certain conditions are met. Currently, that's possible with a web service task but only one task can be inserted at a time for one instance which is limiting possibilities.

The FTP tasks. Ever since UAC changed to using cURL for FTP, we have had a lot of issues.  90% or more of our FTP tasks have been moved away from the UAC task type to our own FTP task using WS-FTP pro (which has more flexibility, that UAC does not offer such as PGP encryption)

Have a better graphical workflow overview, more information on icons, the UI uses. We would like to have information in dependencies in virtual recourses.