We still run into people who are knee deep in Windows, trying to automate various functions and applications, and yet still don’t leverage Windows PowerShell.

There are some great sites to check out when it comes to PowerShell. Here are a couple.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/

http://www.WindowsITPro.com/categories/Category/Scripting/DonJonesonPowerShell.aspx

We recently finished off a module for JAMS that allows JAMS to manage SAP jobs. Sound simple? Well, actually it was quite simple. After about 2 months of work, we had JAMS running SAP jobs and handling dependencies between SAP and non-SAP processes. We started shipping the new SAP component in May and quickly scored two deals as a result. However, we were now at a crossroads, do we spend the $15,000 on getting the official "Certified for SAP" stamp or do we just keep on going.

Give us your feedback on certifications (for products or people)? We still remember the days when it people were writing all sorts of acronyms after their names like MCSE, MCP, CNE…

Last year, one of the industry analyst firms released a document ranking various job scheduling vendors. No shock here that CA, BMC, and IBM received top marks. After all, these three vendors always seem to receive great marks in any analyst report you read. The real question is if you know that these three vendors are some of the biggest money spenders on the services provided by these same analyst firms?

By the way, you know the report I mention from 2009 that ranked job scheduling vendors? Well, one of the analysts who wrote it now works at CA. Hmm...

MillerCoors will be running JAMS across all of their breweries in order to streamline all batch processing across the enterprise.

A number of factors were involved in the selection of JAMS at MillerCoors. First, MillerCoors needed an enterprise scheduling system that supported both Windows and OpenVMS as primary scheduling platforms. JAMS' cross-platform, cross-application job scheduling fit the bill.

Second, MillerCoors was using a legacy solution from another vendor and there was concern about the amount of effort that would be required to move from the legacy platform to a modern solution. The good news for MillerCoors is that MVP offers batch scheduling conversion utilities for most other solutions. As a result, MillerCoors converted most of their jobs into JAMS in less than three weeks.

JAMS gives MillerCoors much more automation, control, and visibility over processes running throughout the breweries across North America. JAMS provides alerts if jobs fail anywhere in the workflow. As a result, JAMS can take proactive measures to keep processes flowing.

Twenty two new customers signed on to use JAMS in December 2009. Combined with the new customers that signed on in October and November, MVP had its best quarter ever in terms of new customers and total revenues.

As a testament to the scalability of JAMS, the customers came from various industries, and ranged in size from small regional school systems to Fortune 500 companies.