Exalate

What do you like best?

The visual interface, although new is a good way to go. Easy to configure. There are bugs that I reported but once that is fixed, the product will be complete.

Sales are good. Riddhi Shah is responsive and helps a lot when things get stuck.

What do you dislike?

My fault was to pick this product among others for a mission-critical task. This product should be used when you don't really care too much about what is synced and what is not.

I didn't expect that I need to learn Groovy and become an expert in it, in order to make this thing work properly. Looking back at it, I would say it was easier for me to set up the independent platform and do API calls from it. Definitely.

Support is one big cavity. So far, the only one helpful was Serhiy Onyshchenko. But getting to him is hard.

L1s are just too slow for any standard. Seems like on Fridays everyone is outside. No one touches anything till Monday (which goes to my point of using Exalate for mission-critical tasks). Or there is some work planned so my whole project stops for a whole day until your downtime finishes. Check this for instance: EASE-8778 .

I know that you offered Professional Services, which I would definitely consider during the project planning phase, but the product was advertised as "easy to use" and no one said I will definitely need their help to make it work. Also, PS was not mentioned until we paid for licenses. Now it's too late. I have so many problems that you cannot imagine.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

If you have simple tasks that you need to do, then you might consider Exalate. Using it across platforms (Zendesk, JIRA DC, JIRA Cloud) as I do is painful and not reliable at all. Errors are popping like Xmass lights for all kinds of reasons. Even if you make it work and for hours there is no a single Sync error, two days later you come back, there are 60 errors in the bucket. So it needs to be constantly monitored. Which goes into the reliability section.

Features are different, depending on the platform. For instance, Visual editor which is simple to use and which I do like is available in Zendesk -> Jira Cloud migration, but when you try JIRA DC -> Jira Cloud migration, this option is not available. You need to go with the script. So if you didn't have any contact with Groovy, now you will have to excel it. So definitely you should check if using something to do API calls instead of Exalate is something that is easier to set up.

Some of the bugs of the Zendesk component interface I've already reported so these need to be fixed. Limitations like the addition of the new fields you need to overcome.

Here is the explanation. If you create a connection using Visual editor and after you are done you want to add one new field to be synced, this is not possible without writing a script. It doesn't o refresh.

Also, system fields from Zendesk are not being synced so I cannot catch Zendesk Issue ID and place it on the JIRA ticket for reference. This is a problem when keeping track of issues you have in Sync!

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I'm using Exalate to support migration from Zendesk to Jira Cloud and from Jira DC to Jira Cloud.

Important to mention is that I'm not using it to migrate issues! I'm using it to keep them in sync (unidirectional) until the cutover date. Another tool is being used for the actual migration of issues.

Also, I have a deadline today to either make it work or drop Exalate completely. So fun times.