Resources

Whether you’re just starting to think about an automation project or have one already underway, there are significant opportunities for improving processing. Here’s a list of a dozen items you should consider. 12. Automate the process of monitoring the schedule. Are you still manually checking off jobs in a log as they finish? There is Read More

Fortra is leading the pack when it comes to the digital transformation of higher education. That was made even more apparent at Ellucian Live 2019. Our JAMS team caught up with three groups of higher education professionals – those who are looking to centralize Banner processes, those who are looking for an alternative to their Read More

Today’s companies need automation solutions to attain the high levels of availability, reliability, and productivity required to coordinate complex operations across many different systems. To this end, cross-platform enterprise job schedulers, such as JAMS, allow you to better control and automate your job streams, even ones with intricate dependencies. Automation solutions also have the potential Read More

Originally, job scheduling software automated the tedious batch submission of IT workloads. While most systems have some rudimentary ability to run tasks locally, those capabilities fall short in terms of ease of administration and the ability to define jobs across distributed systems and servers. As the number and variety of platforms has spread, distributed job Read More

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

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

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

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

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

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