GoAnywhere MFT Reviews

The primary use case is basically to push data, SFTP, and FTP to other vendors offsite. So, it is all secured. We like it because of the security features in it.

In terms of deployment, it is a local standalone system.

It centralized the exchange of data between systems, employees, customers, and trading partners. It is important to us because it is all secured and encrypted. It is a very well-known product for this type of thing, and we have confidence that the data is going to be securely transferred to the other site. Because we deal with finances and stuff like that, we have to make sure it is secure.

It eliminates the need for custom programs and scripts for file transfers, but we do have some scripts. For the most part, it meets what we need to do, and we don't have to interfere with any scripting or anything like that. A lot of it is basically pointing, clicking, and putting in your information, and off you go.

Its workflow features helped us to eliminate manual processes. We do the same thing every day. We have things set up in the schedulers, and it automatically does them. If there are any issues, we get a report and look into it to see what was the issue. Usually, it is because the line is disconnected, the other system is down, or we have a problem with our network. 

The automation of file transfers has helped us to reduce workload in our organization. We've all been using it, so for us, the reduction has always been there, and it has always been the same. If we had to do it manually, it would take a lot longer.

If I have a job that I need to run on the system and I want the data transferred, I can use GoAnywhere and schedule it on a daily basis, a weekly basis, or whatever, and it does the job for me to transfer the files over to the other systems, or back and forth.

It stays up and running. If there is an error with a job, it provides us reports. It is easy to understand.

It is very comprehensive in terms of workflow features. It gives us a lot of options and is also easy to implement. It meets all our needs. We've always been using it, so all we know is GoAnywhere. For the AS/400 system, GoAnywhere is perfect.

The process of adding a vendor is very easy. You just point and click. You create your job, schedule, and project, and off you go. You just need to know what the processes do when you add in a new job that runs daily and so on. For us, it is not a problem, but maybe the documentation on that could be a little more straightforward. We, however, have no problems figuring that out. It is pretty straightforward for us.

In terms of features, it is perfect for the way we use it. They just need to keep up with the security stuff, and that's about it. They should make sure that GoAnywhere or HelpSystems stays on top of security, and they're dealing with all the necessary issues that come up on a daily basis on the internet with the security. Other than that, all our needs are being met. The way it is right now, it is perfect for us. We have no other needs for it. We're definitely not asking HelpSystems for any improvements. So, we're fine and satisfied with it.

It has been here well before my time. It has been more than 10 years.

Its stability is perfect and excellent. It doesn't go down. I don't think we've made any calls for support on this product all year. So, it is perfect for us.

It doesn't matter. For our purposes, it is just fine the way it is. We've got nowhere to scale it to or scale it down. 

In terms of the number of users, I'm the administrator, and all we do is run jobs. There are basically maybe 40 vendors that we SFTP or FTP to and that's it, but individuals don't use it. We added another vendor just the other day, and the process of adding a vendor is very easy for us. So, as new vendors come on board, its usage increases, but there is a very slow addition to this. It is just not a super-growing area for us. 

Their support is great. They've always been there whenever we had any issues. They always provided a prompt courier service. They were very professional and patient, and there were no issues. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

All of us here have always worked with GoAnywhere, and it has worked well. We haven't had the need to go out and source another solution. So, we just leave it.

Usually, on other systems I have worked with, I do things myself with just FTP scripts and stuff like that, but on this system, we have to have something like this. It has got to be controlled because of the sensitivity of the data. So, I haven't had any other product knowledge. It has been working fine, so we just leave it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I joined this company after the implementation of this solution. 

For the money we make using this, it is well priced. Without it, we would be in trouble. If something broke and we couldn't get that data through, we're going to be losing a lot of money. So, I guess the return on investment is always great because the data is getting out. It is not that we make money per data that we send out. It is just that the data that goes out is very critical to the revenue stream.

I get the invoices, and its price is fine and appropriate. It is well priced. Even if it was double the price, we'd use it. For us, it is indispensable. We're not going to go anywhere else.

There are no additional costs. Its licensing is good. There is just one charge that we get. That's it.

I would advise others to go for it. It is a great product. If there are any issues, the support is there, and they're very helpful and right on the case.

I would rate HelpSystems GoAnywhere MFT a 10 out of 10.

We are in the healthcare industry and we use GoAnywhere for file transfers in our finance, HR, clinical and logistical processes

GoAnywhere has helped improve our organization through the centralization of file transfer management, as well as standards enforcement. The error reporting and file auditing capabilities make troubleshooting problems and issues a fairly straightforward process.

GoAnywhere is the perfect tool to help centralize the exchange of data between systems, employees, customers, and trading partners. This is of critical importance to us because in previous implementations, where we've had trouble connecting with our partners and vendors and such, from a troubleshooting perspective it could take a day to solve an issue, but using the GoAnywhere tools & capabilities, we can address  most issues in minutes, instead of hours.

The user interface is intuitive, although someone who's not familiar with coding may have a little bit more of a challenge with it. I have a background in programming and infrastructure, and I found that it was logical & well designed. 

The comprehensiveness of GoAnywhere's workflow features is fantastic. 

The workflow features almost completely eliminate the need for custom programs and scripts for file transfers. I would estimate that we have cut out custom scripts by about 95%. For the remaining 5%, we use the OS integration feature to allow us to interface with a given system and run OS native commands/scripts/operations from within GoAnywhere.

The elimination of custom scripts for every transfer was an important and valuable step for the organization from an operations, maintenance & support perspective.  We can build out a Managed File Transfer process in GoAnywhere with none of the hassles and headaches associated with scripts in an hour vs. custom scripting processes that would take significantly longer to develop and deploy.  we are doing the same work that existed prior to implementing GoAnywhere, but now the processes are faster, simpler, more supportable and secure.  With GoAnywhere, we are able to service our customers much faster and in a much more dependable, consistent and reliable manner.

The automation of file transfers has helped to reduce our workload for file transfers, freeing us up to focus more on the business requirements. For example, in the past, my customers would come to me with, "Hey. I can't find my files, they haven't been downloaded today."  With GoAnywhere we are able to give them a notification via email processes we build into our GoAnywhere jobs, allowing them to see the status of their respective file transfers.

Within the specific context of an organization-wide project, we managed to accomplish MFT request turnaround in a few days where previously, it may day weeks with our previous toolset.

I find the entire solution to be useful for what I do.

Specifically, the encryption & certificate functions, the ability to reuse a defined resource (SFTP server/Network share, e.g.) across multiple transfers and the granularity of the audit logs functionality is a solid tool for troubleshooting.

The support desk has room for improvement. I keep opening tickets and they keep telling me that they're closed, but they're not resolved.

Customer service is an area in need of improvement.

We have been using HelpSystems GoAnywhere MFT since the spring of 2018.

Since we implemented GoAnywhere in the spring of 2018, there has been one bug that has caused us any issues. It was readily addressed by contacting the help desk.

Overall, stability has been rock solid.

I transfer tens of thousands of files per week and scalability is not a problem. I honestly think I would have difficulty scaling GoAnywhere to a point where a point where I would be concerned.

The users we have are GoAnywhere admins and they build managed file transfers. There aren't any functionalities that our customer community has access to.

At this point, more than 70% of our Managed File Transfer processes are utilizing GoAnywhere. The goal, although it may never be fully attained, is to get the rest of those outliers doing file transfers through the secure and dependable enterprise-grade system that is GoAnywhere.

In 2018, 2019, I would have rated the support a ten out of ten. As previously expressed, I would now give them a four.

Prior to GoAnywhere, we used native operating system shell scripts and, worse, daily human processes.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. Their installation methodologies and their architectural configuration are pretty much laid out for you in their marketing documentation. From an implementation perspective, everything is there for you.

The installation took a couple of hours but from that point, it took probably two weeks before it was in functional production.   The strength of GoAnywhere is in the vary rich toolset.  Unfortunately, that also means that there can be a learning curve as one starts to implement it into Production.

I was the implementer of this product and I didn't require the help of a third party. Any issues or concerns I had during the implementation phase were readily addressed by the vendors (then) support staff.  At the time, they were very good at answering quickly and responding to the implementation issues that I encountered.  At the present time, I would suspect that the support is not to the level it was when we implemented GoAnywhere in 2018.

For the first three years, our GoANywhere implementation was really a one-man band in terms of managing the system, including implementing functionality.  As we have grown i to the systm a second administrator has beendrafted into the MFT Team.  

For what we pay to GoAnywhere every year, we are getting a fantastic deal. From a dollar perspective, it provides very good value.

We reviewed three other products prior to implementing GoAnywhere. One that I recall is MOVEit, which was an Ipswitch product at the time.

The user interface that MOVEit had was abysmal. In contrast, the user interface that GoAnywhere has is intuitive and although it obviously depends on each individual user, overall, it's great. The ability to employ the functions and build out what needs to be built out is not a difficult process. It can be complex in some instances, but it's not difficult.

We are not running the latest version; however, it is only because we are too busy with other things at the moment.

For me, this solution is fantastic. I'm able to solve a lot of problems for my organization by using the whole collection of features in GoAnywhere.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Here at the police department, we do a lot of file moving between systems. We have a citation system and we need that data moved over to an RMS (Reports Management System). Those systems don't communicate with each other. So we use it to pick up those files, move them over to that system, and then consume those files and data. We do a lot of that stuff. We also do exports to SFTP sites and automatic emails with warnings of server maintenance.

We do mostly automatic reports but also some manual reports. These can be daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly.  We use GoAnywhere to complete manual processes- like things that we don't need to do very often. We'll go in and just click a button and it runs a bunch of things that we normally would have to do manually. It speeds up the process quite a bit. The great thing about it is that we have a central station to manage basically all of our tasks. Instead of running task schedulers on every server, we can just go here and know exactly what's running where. It's much easier to manage.

It enabled us to allocate staff toward other work. All the time that we would have wasted working on this stuff and correcting problems is put into other parts of our job. That's one of the best things about it, is that we don't waste time on these projects. We just don't have to worry about them because we set up the project to let us know if there's a problem.

It actually helps with customer service because we don't have to wait and find out from a customer when something goes wrong. We know right away and we can fix it before they even know what happened.

GoAnywhere also enabled us to acquire or disseminate more data and documents. It saves at least ten hours per month because we can more easily figure out any issues happening by reviewing the logs. 

The fact that we can easily move files and email the pertinent people about it to tell details about those files is valuable to us. They can see what happened during that process and also catch errors. If there's an error, it'll let us know and we can go in and fix it instead of waiting two days and finding out that something didn't happen.

The intuitiveness of the GoAnywhere user interface is really good. It takes a little time to learn just like anything, but once you learn how to use it, it's very simple.

I've never seen anything like the comprehensiveness of GoAnywhere's workflow features.

The workflow features eliminate the need for custom programs and scripts for file transfer. That's the main thing I use it for. 

It's very important because the custom programs get too complicated and they're kept in random areas, so this is like a central area that you can manage complex programs. But they're easier to create also, so I think just managing those systems and being able to do something that you might not be able to do outside of the system is great.

I have been able to eliminate at least 20 to 30 custom programs and scripts by centralizing everything in GoAnywhere.

GoAnywhere's workflow features have helped us to eliminate manual processes. It's made operations more efficient and more managed.

The automation of file transfers helped to reduce the workload in my current company. All of our transfers are automatic and we're notified about them. It eliminates a lot of wasted time because I'll know if something went wrong. Sometimes the SFTP sites are down and I'll know right away and then we can try it again or have an automatic process to know that something went wrong and it'll try it again later, so I'd have to sit around and waste time trying to re-transfer or not knowing that something, maybe something didn't work. It saves us around three hours a week.

There's not a lot of improvement I can think of. Maybe in the tools section, there is a SQL Wizard which works really well. I think that the SQL Wizard could use some improvement- it's little slow when moving from page to page. 

I've been using GoAnywhere between two different areas of CMSO for about five years.

The stability is really good. The service stopped few years ago but we were able to get it up and running quickly- we upgraded the version and haven't had it shutdown since. 

The scalability is really good. It can go across almost any platform that I know of. It can be installed in different systems, which many programs will not work on IBMs and on Windows systems. So it can be moved and work between systems.

In terms of users, there are hundreds that are influenced by the solution including records, clerks, record supervisors, police officers, all of our IT people- as well as different organizations, such as the DOJ and court systems.

Two of us on the IT team are 100% responsible for the maintenance. 

We've used things built into the systems like in Windows Task Scheduler and things like that. The workflow is similar, but you just can't do as much. Or if you try to do as much, it gets really complicated. At that point, when it gets that complicated, things break, not everybody can follow it. If you make a complex Task Scheduler with PowerShell Scripts, someone coming in off the street is not going to be able to figure it out very easily.

Our ROI is definitely positive. 

I think the pricing is fair. 

It's not too expensive. You pay for extras and you pay separately for separate products. We're not any other GoAnywhere products, so we don't have to pay for it. It's not too expensive for us.

The cost of GoAnywhere compared with the value it brings to our data transfer operations is more than fair. 

I believe GoAnywhere connects to almost any type of server.  I move many things through SFTP and I think it pretty much connects to any kind of system you're looking for. It'll connect to cloud systems as well.

My advice would be to look and see what it can do and then look at how it could improve your processes. I think you'll notice that you'll end up saving money by purchasing the product and saving a headache here and there.

I would rate GoAnywhere a ten out of ten. 

We are using it for Managed File Transfer and secure FTP and BGP processes for incoming and outgoing files. We also move data inside of the network using the GoAnywhere agent between servers, and we have also used the scripting capabilities of GoAnywhere for the change in a file's name and other things.

GoAnywhere MFT helps centralize the exchange of data between systems, employees, customers, and trading partners.

The interface of GoAnywhere MFT is good. It is easy to use. It is clear. The help is very good.

GoAnywhere’s workflow features eliminate the need for custom programs and scripts for file transfer. It is very important for us because normally when you receive the file, you need to perform a lot of work to be sure that you can deliver or integrate with the backend. It helps to have the capabilities for automation or manipulation of the files through the workflows.

GoAnywhere’s workflow features help to eliminate manual processes, especially processes related to encryption using BGP.

It is very easy to use. It is easy to create projects in a graphical environment. The configuration and the setup of the environment is very easy. In general, the use of the software is very simple. It is clear, and it is one of the best products. 

It is very simple to use, and it is powerful. The configuration is very flexible in terms of the protocols and algorithms for encryption and security configuration.

In some cases, the logs need deeper information. In terms of communication and checking, they need to go a little deeper.

In some scenarios, when you are in a cluster environment, the load-balancing capabilities of the gateway need to be improved a little. This functionality needs some improvement.

In general, workflow features are good, but when you need to use the transformation capabilities, there are some problems in terms of the way they manage the resources of the machine. There are some limitations in the size of the file, so the transformation capability has to be improved. 

I have been using this solution for 3 years.

Their support needs improvement. We have a partner, but we are not receiving a quick response. I do not know if the customers have the same experience, but in our opinion, it needs some improvement in terms of the response time. I would rate their support a 7 out of 10.

Neutral

We work with some IBM products, such as IBM Sterling File Gateway. In some scenarios, it is as powerful as GoAnywhere MFT, but it is much more complex to use and set up. GoAnywhere MFT is easier. IBM has an advantage in terms of support of Connect:Direct, which is a proprietary protocol. It is a very strong protocol. It is one of the differentiators of IBM.

Its deployment is very easy.

We are not making a calculation, but it depends on the kind of file you are moving. In some cases, if the file does not go through, you could have problems with the logistics, but I do not have a number for the return on investment.

It is very attractive. In terms of the capacity of the product and functionality, it is a good price. Considering its capabilities, its price is good. 

We know GoAnywhere has the capability to connect to popular ICAP servers, but we are not using any.

I would rate GoAnywhere MFT a 9 out of 10.

We're using GoAnywhere mostly for file transfers to different sites. Normally, we allow any incoming transfer. We go out and grab the files and bring them in through the GoAnywhere system.

GoAnywhere makes it easy to move files around. We have quite a bit of information we have to transfer to around 300 different companies that require us to send data on a regular basis. If we did this manually, it would require several employees. 

With GoAnywhere's workflow features, we don't need to write custom programs and scripts for file transfers. We could write them, but it would cost more time and man-hours to get done. By centralizing everything in GoAnywhere, we're able to eliminate 100 or so custom programs and scripts. 

GoAnywhere automates all of the file transfers, so we don't have to do it manually. We're sending out files every minute. It has reduced our workload tremendously and made everything less complicated. We're not necessarily sending out more files, but we're saving time. If I had to quantify it, I would estimate that it cuts our workload by about 80 hours a week.

GoAnywhere centralizes the data exchange, saving us quite a bit of time.

GoAnywhere's interface could be a little more intuitive. It can be hard to grasp at first, but once you have a decent understanding, it's pretty straightforward.

We've been using GoAnywhere for four or five years.

The program is great. We've never really had a problem with stability. We did have an issue with the old server we were running it on, but that's not GoAnywhere's problem.

I've never had any issues with scalability. I'm sure we'll add more jobs to GoAnywhere in the future. We add them every now and then, but it's not frequent. We're already using it fairly extensively. However, we probably don't know what features are available, so we could possibly do more.

We've worked with HelpSystems support, and it has always been excellent. I rate their support 10 out of 10. They helped us transfer several jobs to the new server because the syntax of setting it up wasn't exactly the same. We were migrating from a pretty old version.

Positive

I wasn't involved with the initial deployment, but it takes less than an hour to set GoAnywhere up and move it to a new server. Most of that time was spent moving the jobs over because we had preexisting jobs to move from the old server. It takes one systems analyst to manage GoAnywhere, and it's not a full-time job. 

GoAnywhere is low cost for what it does, and we save a lot of hours with it.

I rate HelpSystems GoAnywhere MFT 10 out of 10. It's a great product that does everything we need it to do. I would advise anyone implementing GoAnywhere to get some training and learn how to build different jobs.

We are a healthcare company, and large employers and health plans will hire us to provide our services to their employees and members. They then have to send us files as to who their employees are, and we have to process them under the guidance of HIPAA. GoAnywhere is our file transfer platform for securely sharing health information.

The workflow features eliminate the need for custom programs and scripts for file transfers. The impact has been huge and has saved us many months of engineering time. GoAnywhere's workflow features have helped us eliminate manual processes and have streamlined our operations and made them more secure and repeatable.

We have been able to eliminate single-function tools or unsecured file transfer methods like email-based file transfers. Before switching to GoAnywhere, we had a lot of files being sent to us over email.

GoAnywhere has enabled us to allocate staff toward other work and has freed up engineering talent to focus on more important problems. We have been able to reduce the workload as well.

We like that GoAnywhere helps to centralize the exchange of data among our systems, employees, and customers. We wanted something that was scalable and secure and had a nice API, so we could automate the creation of new accounts and new directories and build a workflow around it. Every time we sign up a new customer, we can automatically create a setup for them. Some customers use a username and password, and others use a pre-shared key. We can build the workflow so that when we receive a new file, it alerts our application servers to go pick it up and process it. It is our one and only method by which we exchange data with our largest customers.

The user interface is highly intuitive; we got it set up and running within a matter of days. It is useful when support staff are trying to troubleshoot issues.

The comprehensiveness of GoAnywhere's workflow features is very high, and it has met all of our needs.

At present, HelpSystems GoAnywhere MFT integrates with an antivirus solution, but it's a bit kludgy. It would be nice if the antivirus were built into the product so that it doesn't require integration.

We've been using it for four and a half years.

It's been very stable, and we have never had issues. It's stable enough that we give our customers a service level on the service that we provide with this solution.

For what we do, it scales perfectly. We haven't had any issues.

We use it for two or three different use cases, and it gets used every single day. It's mission-critical to us.

We're not adding any new use cases to it at present, but our use of it will grow as we assign new customers.

I haven't personally contacted technical support, but as far as I know, we've had no issues with it.

We previously used a homegrown solution and switched because we wanted something that would scale and that wouldn't require customization every time we signed up a new customer.

The initial setup was very straightforward and fast. We had it going and were using it within a matter of days.

The part-time effort of one engineer is required for maintenance of the solution.

We implemented it ourselves.

As for ROI, it probably paid for itself in the first two months. The license cost for the first year was roughly equivalent to two months of an engineer's salary. By freeing up engineers from creating customized solutions, it paid for itself immediately.

HelpSystems GoAnywhere MFT is very reasonably priced for the value it brings.

Make sure that you fully spec out your environment and include all the servers, clusters, and features you're going to need before you worry about the price.

If you are dependent on file transfers for your business, there isn't a better solution. Don't waste your time trying to evaluate other solutions. I would highly recommend GoAnywhere and would rate it at ten on a scale from one to ten.

We use the solution for SFTP and HTTPS.

We went from a single client to a clustered environment and that's nice for maintenance work. The thing that has improved is the high-availability.

We basically use the SFTP and HTTPS for transferring files. If it's dealing with SFTP or any kind of secure transfer, we don't hear about it. It's good. Everything works.

Also, for importing information and exporting it, it's not too bad.

We have it implemented on-prem only. That's one of the issues we have. When we restart the agent on each server, it tries to go out to the internet and it takes about a 13-minute timeout before it can move forward. Why is there a 13-minute timeout value when trying to go to the internet? Shouldn't it be a minute or so? We weren't sure why it was taking that long, and then we noticed that it took almost exactly 13 minutes, every single time. We looked into it and we found out that it could be a timeout value. They checked with their developers and they said, "Yeah, it looks like it is a timeout value." We have worked with a support engineer and they definitely know about it, but so far there is no fix.

If they could limit that timeout or give us a way to modify it so we could have a faster timeout, that would help us at least knock out a half-hour's worth of outage.

In addition, when you log in through the GUI, it always fails the first time and says that your time expired, and it makes you log in twice. Supposedly it's a bug. If they could fix that, that would be awesome.

Also, in some areas it could be more user-friendly, when it comes to adding certificates and or keys for access.

The organization I'm working for has been using HelpSystems GoAnywhere MFT for at least a couple of years,  but we just implemented our new cluster environment in February or March, about seven or eight months ago.

So far, the stability has been good. 

The only thing I have noticed is that if you take it down hard, sometimes the startup can get corrupted. So you have to make sure you shut down that application. We had an issue where it lost the NFS mounts for a couple hours. When we tried to bring it back up, it wouldn't recognize where it was at and we had to call support. But most of the time, you don't want to take anything down hard.

Other than that, it seems to be pretty stable.

The support is really good, but the ticket system is not that good.

When you open the ticket, that's the only time you can see what is in the ticket. Support engineers can see it, but if you're a customer and you want to update your ticket or look at the ticket that you created, you can't access it. I think they know about that, but I don't know if they've done anything about it lately. It's one thing I can't stand. If you go to other vendors and you open a ticket, you can actually go into the ticket and update it. You can't do that with GoAnywhere's ticketing system.

I would recommend GoAnywhere, depending on how much it costs. I'm not involved with the cost side of things. For the most part, you can access it from the internet into the web servers, or you can have it only localized. So I would recommend it.

We have three or four admin people who can help maintain it, but that's only in case one of the people isn't available.

We have a lot of different files that we need to move from in-house to a vendor. While our online banking configuration is real-time, we upload files every morning to cover some aspects of that online banking. Customers also send us files and we pull them off of our secure servers and push them on to our core application vendor. In summary, our use case is almost entirely secure file movement: making sure a file gets from here to there.

We're running this as a cluster with four Linux platforms, two at our on-site and two at our co-location site. Always live. 

Our web development team wants to do source code management for change control of our executables. They are working right now on setting that up. GoAnywhere is the resource that handles movements from test to acceptance, and from acceptance into production. The reason we do that with GoAnywhere is that its logging capabilities, of all of the actions that have been taken, are exquisite, in my opinion, and I've been working in core for 40 years. If anybody wants to know if something did or didn't happen, I can point at a specific line in a job log that says yes or no.

It has also centralized the exchange of data. We used to use an iSeries to run our core operations. There was a job scheduler on it, and we used that to invoke certain GoAnywhere jobs to do motion. Since then, we've converted off of the iSeries, and because GoAnywhere can run on Linux or Windows platforms, we didn't need to do away with it. We could just move it. And we could also move some of the scheduling that we still had to do off of the Series and have GoAnywhere's job scheduler handle it for us. And that's what we did.

We used to use two or three other scripted FTP processes in Robo-FTP, where the operator would double-click on an icon on a desktop to do something. Those all got moved into GoAnywhere.

And its workflow features have very much helped us to eliminate manual processes. That has made our operations a lot smoother. We've had some staff changes. One of those staff changes necessitated our automating a bunch of functions and we're doing so and continuing to improve that automation. In addition, the automation of file transfers has helped to reduce workload by about one-third to one-half of an FTE.

In terms of handling more documents, we set up a lot of file transfers to the core application server of documents created in our bank's branch system. GoAnywhere supported all of that.

All of our internal, as well as external file transfers, are secured now, and GoAnywhere is what was used. We used GoAnywhere when we created the external servers to go from FTP to secure FTP and GoAnywhere supported that transition really easily. We were able to get rid of one internal FTP server after we did that.

The workflow features eliminate the need for custom programs and scripts for file transfers. It handles a lot of different things. We have gone into database programming, to some extent, with a few of our transfers that require a bit of translation between how they are when we pick them up and what they need to look like for where we send them. I'm looking forward to using that ability a little bit more.

Another nice feature is that you can invoke a native program from GoAnywhere. That helps you because you don't have to get fancy with agents. If a native program runs on the server that GoAnywhere is running on, like sed or perl, you can use it,

The intuitiveness of GoAnywhere's user interface is pretty good. The nature of job scheduling is that it can sometimes be really intricate, and difficult to see and understand. We've had learning on it, but the main person who supports it for us digs in and finds documentation that explains how to go about things. We'll then run some test jobs to make sure it works the way we think it's going to, and then we'll use it. In general, it's very intuitive.

When it comes to GoAnywhere's workflow features, there are a couple of areas where I'd like to get a little more consistency. The two aspects of scheduling that we use are scheduled jobs and monitors. And there's cross-capability between the two. We've done some philosophical thinking about when a function should be handled by a monitor and when it should be handled by a scheduled job. When a monitor invokes a project to accomplish something, that gets logged as a job. I've had a little difficulty figuring out where to look to see the monitor's activities itself, to see if the monitor is having a problem. 

For instance, if an account on a secure FTP server has expired, the monitor that uses that account doesn't announce to us that it's having a problem. I want to work with them on this to get it fixed.

Another aspect would be greater visibility into exactly what's happening. But part of that is because we haven't learned how to look at it. I still need to establish some training for my people who support this. We've learned a lot and done a lot with the documentation, which is pretty good, but some formal training would really help tie together a lot of the little tidbits of knowledge in our heads.

We have been using HelpSystems GoAnywhere MFT for eight to 10 years.

I don't believe it was any fault of HelpSystems, but the service did stop working for a couple of hours one time. I need to check with them and see if there's a way to restart that says, "Go back and pick up the stuff that didn't run." In this particular instance, the number of things that didn't run was small enough that I could manually look at the schedule screen and figure out what needed to be run. Still, I'm wondering if there's a button I could have pushed that would have taken care of all of that automatically. If that's not a feature they have, that might be something they should implement.

Aside from supporting the occasional new needs, we don't have plans to increase our use of GoAnywhere.

Their tech support is pretty good in responding to us and in helping us to work through any issues that might crop up.

At times we've had some difficulty getting a point across, but I won't assign 100 percent of the responsibility for that to them. Sometimes we won't phrase things correctly. But they don't run away from us. They stick to it and figure out what's going on.

Positive

I didn't do the original deployment. It was done by some engineers who reported to me, and then our web developer did the current implementation of four Linux servers. But the original setup was pretty straightforward.

I have one guy who supports the servers but he rarely has to do anything on them. I also have one web developer who manages all of the jobs. It works out to 1.25 FTEs and that's because they're always looking at ways they can make these projects work better.

GoAnywhere pays for itself easily. It has saved us work and enables us to sleep through the night.

They were open-minded and they did what they could for us, in terms of cost, when we made the transition to GoAnywhere.

And when we migrated from the iSeries to Linux servers, HelpSystems carried forward the startup money that we spent when we originally installed GoAnywhere on the iSeries. We did not have to pay startup fees on the Linux servers. We got credit and that was nice of them.

GoAnywhere was on our radar before we got it. We knew of other options, but after seeing the demo for GoAnywhere, we saw that it does what we needed. I did do a small business case for it that included an examination of other options, but that was a long time ago.

I'm fond of this tool. I don't know how much of an opportunity I'll get to explore other aspects of GoAnywhere's services, but I like what it's doing for us. 

I would 100 percent recommend GoAnywhere to someone else who is looking for solutions in this area.