How you manage the background processing in your data center says a lot about you as an IT professional. Reports, backups, and other maintenance—these jobs aren’t glamorous, but they are critical and highly visible. When the completion of IT processes directly impacts the bottom line of the organization or the satisfaction of clients, it is important to maintain an Read More
Posted in Uncategorized If at First You Don’t Succeed… One of the simplest workload automation tactics is the retry. The retry is, by no means, a permanent solution for a failing job. But, if your entire schedule of critical batch processes is made better by a successful execution – albeit later than you would have liked – then Read More
Posted in Automate Smarter, Workload Automation Core Concept Waiting indefinitely, whether for the coffee you ordered 5 minutes ago, or for the date who is an hour late, causes one to question whether the expected outcome will ever happen. A well-designed workload automation strategy minimizes this type of uncertainty by establishing policies for runaways – jobs that should have completed within a set Read More
Posted in Workload Automation Core Concept Companies run many of their mission-critical processes on a growing array of Windows servers these days. Instead of automating nightly batch streams on a mainframe, data centers are running processes on multiple Windows servers using built-in schedulers like the Windows Task Scheduler applet or Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio. Simple schedulers like Windows task scheduler work well on individual Read More
Posted in Windows Task Scheduler False starts eat away at an enterprise schedule. So many cycles of computing, database querying, and VM provisioning are wasted because some file wasn’t available yet, or some variable wasn’t set. No matter how perfect your part of the process was executed, the output remains valueless. And, the time invested is a loss to your Read More
Posted in Workload Automation Core Concept An attendee at one of our recent webinars made this comment, “Batch is dead. Why would I need a workload automation tool?” Yes, the definition of batch has changed over the years. But, background processing will never die. It’s just not visible to the end user. For example, when you place an order on a website that order Read More
Posted in Uncategorized Informatica is a powerful tool that helps your organization extract, send, verify, and replicate data. If you’re using Informatica, it probably interacts with many of the systems critical to your business, including CRM, ERP, and others. But if Informatica isn’t fully automated and integrated with the rest of your environment, you’re not maximizing your investment Read More
Posted in integrations Q&A with Dan St. Jean JAMS has helped many Direct Commerce customers automate their all-channel commerce systems. We’ve been in the game so long that it’s not uncommon to hear our customers refer to Ecometry, Red Prairie, and even Escalate Retail, when they call. Whatever you call it, Direct Commerce continues to provide the backbone Read More
Posted in Ecometry Job history is an important topic of conversation in the job scheduling world. In recent articles, we’ve talked about the importance of having reliable and thorough audit history reports of your job schedule, which serves as an important security feature. When you know who is changing your job schedule and how they’re changing it—when you are armed Read More
Posted in Uncategorized Reining in the source of all your jobs is an essential step in your transition to centralized workload automation. Even if you are not writing code all day, you must think of yourself as a developer. Your “application” is the business. And, the features of your application are its automated workloads. Silos are for Farms, Read More
Posted in JAMS, Security, Source Control