Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT for Windows (BYOL)

My use cases for GoAnywhere MFT involve interfacing with both banks and outside vendors since it's the university. We do a lot of interfaces, and many of them come through for the banks using our GoAnywhere MFT product, and we process into our SAP system. 

It's not just banks; we also do outside vendors and outside providers. We handle both ways—into our SAP system through GoAnywhere MFT and out to outside vendors, banks, and hospitals. You name it, we do it.

The feature I find most valuable about GoAnywhere MFT is that it's intuitive. 

It has all the things needed to build robust projects, giving you different resources, SFTP, and all the different things you might need to manipulate files. It's somewhat tricky as it's intuitive, however. You have to learn the scripting language. That said, they provide fairly good help.  

We were fortunate enough when we first purchased the product to have them assist us with demos and teaching as a group. They offer online help to look things up. 

For us, it satisfies our needs. We are getting into some more complex matters that I am concerned about, as there are a couple of features I wish they had. Until now, we've been able to accomplish everything we wanted. 

We keep asking them to implement a feature for our upcoming project, which would benefit all other companies using the product.

One area for improvement in GoAnywhere MFT is that they don't have a real debugger. You have to manually walk through your projects. If you build a big scripting project, you have no way at the beginning to step through; you can't skip straight to a line, nor can you put a breakpoint and say, 'stop here' as in any normal debugging process. That makes handling complex projects very tedious. We are currently working to streamline a process for about 240 providers—our interface partners—and it's going to be very difficult because every time you run a project, you need to step through each line of code. If you're testing line 98 and are unsure what's going on, you must step through every single line each time you run it. That is its biggest downfall.

What I would love to see in GoAnywhere MFT is the ability to compartmentalize some of the code, allowing you to call different pieces. Instead of building one project all within itself, you could insert modules that you can use in multiple projects. Currently, it's not compartmentalized, and you can't take a piece of code to use elsewhere without copying the entire thing. In my humble opinion, it would be much better if they had a class-based or class-oriented system so that you could easily transfer code from one location to another or use it in other places. You want modularity within the project, but that's not available right now, and this significantly slows down our development operations.

I have been using GoAnywhere MFT for about four years, since we first installed it.

I have never seen any lagging, crashing, or downtime when using GoAnywhere MFT, and that's one of the best things I can say about it.

From my perspective, working at the university, I find GoAnywhere MFT to be quite scalable. 

We also have a hospital group that works with it, which operates differently, however, they appear to manage tasks well. Yet, it would be even more scalable and useful if they improved the ability to plug in components, allowing you to easily call pieces of code from a project and eliminate the need for repetition. 

To go off the charts and be a leader, they really need a debugger and should focus on enabling the breakdown of modules for integration with other projects. A project isn't just one thing; it should allow for calling additional resources. This would greatly enhance scalability.

If I had to rate the support, I would rate it as an eight on a scale from one to ten. I haven't dealt with them directly. That said, overall, they seem to perform at about an eight level.

Positive

The initial deployment of GoAnywhere MFT was pretty easy for us. Once everything was set up properly, it was not very hard. Out of all the projects I have been involved with over 26 years at the university, that one actually went more smoothly than most. We had a good team working to get everything handled, so I would say it wasn't difficult at all. It took us around a month to set it up.

I have looked into alternatives to GoAnywhere MFT, and I remember examining a couple of options about four or five years ago when we made our decision. There was another one we compared it to. I cannot recall the name. We looked at MOVEit as the other option we evaluated.

We do not use those connectors right now in GoAnywhere MFT. Our processes are very specific to our interface workflows. 

Currently, we're not using it for workflow-type applications, although it might be something we can explore down the line. 

We do not use the Agents or Secure Forms. Regarding data acceleration, we don't use GoFast either. 

We're using it for very specific tasks, and if they explained options for utilizing it for other purposes, I would be open to exploring it. 

I would indeed like to see better advanced documentation in GoAnywhere MFT. 

I would rate GoAnywhere MFT overall as an eight out of ten. It's a great product and could easily reach a ten if it improved certain features.

I use GoAnywhere MFT  for files and transfer management.

The best feature of GoAnywhere MFT  is that it's easy to use, and the drag-and-drop option is available. Instead of coding or hard coding, the drag-and-drop option is good. 

I use the SharePoint  connector. The connector with SharePoint  allowed me to share Excel and different files. 

The interface could be more customizable.

I have been using this solution for six to seven months.

GoAnywhere MFT  is stable, and I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.

The scalability of the solution is good.

More than 10,000 users utilize the solution.

I would rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

It was easy. The setup took less than half an hour to complete.

The solution has saved a significant amount of time.

The pricing is moderate.

My team management purchased the solution and provided me with credentials for coding.

I would recommend this solution to other users because it's very easy to use and many companies are using this product nowadays. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.