AutoMate is a powerful yet easy to use automation software platform that primarily focuses on supplying a complete, all-in-one system for the development, deployment, management and automation of simple to elaborate business and IT processes. It provides all the necessary tools to transform and combine on-premise servers, cloud resources, and end-point devices. Its intuitive, drag-and-drop based graphical interface replaces the traditional model of legacy batch files or scripts and provides businesses of all sizes with a true rapid-development platform for streamlining business operations that requires no programming knowledge to use and maintain. AutoMate raises the bar when it comes to functionality, ease of use and cost efficiency as compared to other systems that are either complicated to use, very expensive, or both. It is the only product of its kind that offers the power and robustness typically found in large enterprise systems along with the simplicity found in smaller systems with much less functionality.
BENEFITS OF AUTOMATION
AutoMate reduces costs and hassles associated with developing and maintaining code, scripts, and batch files. It dramatically increases transaction speeds and consistent and repeatable performance of business processes. More importantly, it eliminates time-consuming, labor-intensive, repetitive IT tasks, enabling employees to focus on activities where human interaction and thought add the most value.
Additionally, AutoMate improves collaboration between business users who benefit from automated processes and IT professionals responsible for delivering automation and supplies organizations with greater control of their networks and operations by centralizing the management of the automation network. In short, AutoMate can accelerate information flows, centralize resources and allow business processes to be performed faster and more accurately resulting in lower cost and increased business capability.
LOWER TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP
AutoMate is the leading platform for business process automation because it goes far beyond the simple linking together of pre-existing batch files, scripts, and custom applications. Automate tasks are developed rapidly and maintained easily, resulting in a lower TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) than traditional automation methods. AutoMate provides cost savings at each phase of the automation project life cycle:
- Develop - Drag-and-drop task building enables tasks to be constructed rapidly. No programming code or writing batch files.
- Deploy - Tasks can either be deployed in-place with AutoMate's powerful event-based triggers or they can be deployed across the enterprise to other AutoMate installations called Runtimes with only a few clicks.
- Manage - AutoMate tasks are displayed in plain-English sentences such as "Run the following application" and "Restart the Service", thus eliminating the problem of code abandonment.
REPLACE CODE-INTENSIVE PROCESSES
AutoMate is the superior replacement for scripts, batch files, macros, or any other code intensive process. It's easy drag and drop interface allows rapid construction and automation of virtually any task that can be accomplished in Windows.
WHO USES AUTOMATE?
Approximately 85% of the AutoMate user base is comprised of IT professionals such as Network Administrators, Managers of Information Systems and System Integrators. The remaining 15% is comprised of Software/Web Development professionals, Testing/Quality Assurance Professionals, Data Entry personnel, and of course Home Users. AutoMate, while very powerful, is easy enough for anyone to use. Most of the Fortune 1000 has AutoMate on one or more workstations and/or servers. See our customer list for a list of well known companies that use AutoMate.
WHAT CAN AUTOMATE DO FOR ME?
With AutoMate, IT Professionals can construct tasks that automate a wide variety of network and computing operations, such as:
- Launching applications & sending keystrokes/mouse clicks
- System performance monitoring
- FTP/SFTP file transfers
- Windows Event Log monitoring & handling
- Task Scheduling
- Web data extraction
- Backup & Restore
- MS Excel operations
- MS Exchange management
- Active Directory management
- Terminal Emulation
- Report generation
- Database management
- Environment Variable management
- Back office error detection & handling
- Data encryption/decryption
- Data compression/decompression
- Web Service execution
- Virtual machine operations
- XML parsing
- Bulk processing
- Plus much more - the only limit is your imagination!
AutoMate Professional Edition is the basic version of AutoMate which is designed to automate most desktop processes and operations. With AutoMate Professional, you are able to develop, manage and execute processes on a single (local) computer. It does not support connections to other AutoMate clients for the purpose of Remote Administration. Some new and popular features found in AutoMate Professional are as follows:
ACTIVE DIRECTORY
Automate contains fifteen new Active Directory actions which can aid Network Administrators and IT Technicians with their day-to-day activities by automating a variety of simple to elaborate tasks, such as bulk creation, retrieval, management and deletion of groups, user accounts and other Active Directory objects. These actions eliminate repetitive, mundane and time consuming procedures associated with Active Directory management.
WEB SERVICES
AutoMate's Execute Web Service action provides an automated means of calling a web service method by way of a WSDL document or URI. During runtime, the Execute Web Service action will query for a list of methods and their associated parameters, allow one or more methods to be called and the necessary parameters to be provided for a valid method call to be placed to the Web service. This may require the use of one or more structures as parameters. If structures are required, the user must initially create them during design time using the ‘Define Type’ and ‘Create Object’ actions and place them onto the underlying action. Structures are stored into memory during execution. After the method call is executed, the in-memory structures are automatically discarded. Upon completion of the Web service call, the returned data is placed into the AutoMate variable specified during design time. This can be a standard variable, array or structure.
FILE MANIPULATION
AutoMate contains an assortment of file related actions providing more control and management of files. Such actions include the Concatenate files action, which concatenates two files into a single output file, the Calculate File Checksum action, which can calculate the checksum of a file allowing the most accurate way to compare two files, the Split file activity, which allows splitting of a file into parts of a fixed size and the Join file activity, which merges a previously split file. Additionally, the Touch File activity "touches" file(s) in order to update their creation time, modified time or last accessed time.
EMAIL RETRIEVAL
The Get Email activity is most commonly used to build an automated e-mail attendant capable of automatically retrieving messages, detecting message content and downloading attachments. This activity is capable of connecting to servers other than POP3, namely IMAP and WEBDAV (more commonly known as Exchange). Supplementary features include the addition of Filters, which allows retrieval or removal of particular messages which match only the filter(s) specified. For instance, Filters can be used to retrieve and retain into a dataset only those messages that are from particular senders, are newer than the specified date or contain specific text in the subject, etc. In addition, the 'Get Email' activity now supports SSL (Secure Socket Layer) protocol implementation to allow secure transmissions to those servers supporting SSL.
MICROSOFT EXCEL INTEGRATION
Many organizations rely on Excel on a daily basis but often find it time consuming, non-user friendly. For the most part, the only way to automate Excel functionality and to integrate Excel with other applications is to become a professional Visual Basic developer and learn VBA scripting. This is no longer the case with AutoMate's Excel action, which lets you automate common to complex Excel operations and to integrate Excel spreadsheets with enterprise applications and databases, all without writing code. AutoMate's Excel actions include the ability to create a workbook, add worksheets, retrieve Excel data,
FTP & SECURE FTP (SFTP)
AutoMate's internal FTP engine is compatible with all FTP connection methods, particularly security-based connections. This includes both explicit and implicit FTPS (FTP Secure or FTP-SSL) that adds support for the Transport Layer Security (TLS) and the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) cryptographic protocols. Certificate Authenticity is supported for those servers that require clients to authenticate themselves using a certificate. SFTP (or Secure FTP), which uses Secure Shell (SSH) protocol is also supported. Additionally, it supports Tumbleweed Secure Transport, the industry's most secure Managed File Transfer solution.
EXPRESSIONS
AutoMate contains the ability to embed expressions directly into the parameters of task steps. Any valid BASIC expression can be embedded directly into any step parameter, eliminating the need to write an entire BASIC subroutine using the BASIC Script activity for simple one line data formatting and/or retrieval operations. These operations can now be accomplished “in-line” inside the AutoMate task.
ERROR HANDLING
AutoMate has a three-tiered approach to error handling. Step level error handling handles task exceptions on a per step basis. Errors may be handled on a per task basis as well. This is ideal if the user wants AutoMate to perform specific exception handling procedures for a managed task. AutoMate can also handle errors globally for all tasks that run on a system. If any system level error handling parameters are enabled, AutoMate will act on ALL managed tasks that fail with an error. The user can select from a number of actions to be carried out upon failure, such as send an email alert to specific recipients or run another task upon error, just to name a few.
BASIC SCRIPTING LANGUAGE AND FUNCTION LIBRARY
AutoMate combines scheduling power and application control with a full-featured Visual Basic for Applications compliant scripting language. The scripting engine integrates seamlessly into the existing AutoMate framework, appearing as an extra option in the macro builder called 'Run a Script'. In an automated procedure, you may have an unlimited number of 'script' steps, making decisions, handling complex file I/O routines, etc. The added flexibility of AutoMate's BASIC Script action enables an unlimited number of customized AutoMate oriented commands to be added to the language to make life (and automation) easier for you.
