This week, I'm happy to review and advertise Automise, from the makers of FinalBuilder.

 

As a .NET developer, I’ve always thought that FinalBuilder was a fine product. In fact, it’s one of my favorites and I recommend it to people when doing Daily builds automation. Now, the guys that created FinalBuilder are coming out with a more general purpose tool, based on the FinalBuilder engine, called “Automise”.

The idea is that you can use the same platform to automatise just about any repetitive taks in your shop – copying files, backing up sources, running batch files, changing active directory settings - *anything* that you hate doing by yourself and hate creating a batch file or vb script file to accomplish.

 

The idea here is to give your Sys Admin (in many cases that’s *you* just the same) the power of automating those boring, repetitive tasks, in a very easy UI. It’s FinalBuilder for your Administrator . And it’s going to have stuff specifically for administrators that FinalBuilder does not have.

 

Here’s some of what it currently has:

• Run Command line (duh)
• file operations (copy, move, create, delete, etc)
• CD/DVD burning
• Database manipulations using SQL or Stored procedures
• FTP operations (put, get, create directory, etc)
• Run VBScript or JScript code
• iterate files, folders, file content, lists, etc
• IIS 5 and 6 operations (start, stop, create website, etc)
• create zip files, unpack RAR files, etc
• manipulate XML files
• operate on the .NET GAC
• WMI operations
• Share directory, map network drive
• Change Scheduled Jobs
• Lots more

 

Usability

Very usable UI, which eases maintenance of complicated jobs in the long run.

 

Feature Set

Personally, I’d love to see the following added to this (and the VSoft guys are considering a lot of it in the next version/upgrade):

-         Active Directory actions, permissions

-         A "PowerShell" action (aka Monad) just like a cmd but much more powerful

-         the various folder paths "junction" actions

-         Change file and dir permissions,

-         write permissions and other (all) properties of an object to file,

-         Format drive, make NTFS etc...

-         Synchronize directories automatically

 

Summary

With about half the cost of FinalBuilder, Automise aims to fill that gap between batch hell and “not so much hell if I can automate it”, and does it beautifully. It still needs some more features to make it even more powerful, but even now, it is one of the best tools around for automating tasks. If you also need to build projects, go with FinalBuilder for now. If you need a tool to help you with your batch jobs, or you can’t spare the extra $200, use Automise. You can always make it call an outside command like to build your projects too.

2 points down for lack of features. Everything else is just perfect.

 

Overall score – 8.5 out of 10.