Autoit for Enterprise Solutions?

[Dana86]

The first thing I want to do is Thank Everyone for this amazing & helpful community! I started coding Autoit 17 years ago & this is the first time I've felt the need to ask a serious question on this forum. Most questions are already well documented & answered. 

Has anyone ever used Autoit for enterprise solutions?

[water]

I'm sure it is used uncountable times for enterprise solutions.
Example: My Active Directory UDF (AD.au3) has been downloaded > 11000 times. In my company we use AutoIt for prototyping but for production as well.

[JLogan3o13]

Just my personal experience, I have been in the IT industry since 2004. For the majority of that time I have contracted myself out to different companies, mostly in the healthcare and insurance industries. Since coming across AutoIt, I have used it innumerable times at different customer locations. I have:

• Gone in to hospitals (notoriously behind the technology curve) that were still using vbscript and winbatch, and converted their teams over to using AutoIt.
• I have written custom front ends for Enterprise Suites such as SCCM that are still in use today. These front-end GUIs work off A.D. security groups (thanks @water) to show the end user only those options he/she is entitled to.
• Written solutions for Actuarial departments that pull data from different Oracle sources, aggregate and massage the data, and output to Excel (again, thanks to @water)

Even now, when 99% of what I do is virtualization/DevOps in PowerShell/PowerCLI/Python, I still find myself going back to AutoIt all the time. I recently wrote a script for a customer that allows a user to fill out a form on SharePoint for a new virtual server. The form, once submitted, goes through an approval process, generates a ticket in their system and, if approved, is built in the correct VMware environment (out of 5 vCenters) and ready to log into within 30 minutes. Much of the PowerShell modules are calling AutoIt in the background, because it just made more sense (i.e. the same GUI that takes 1171 lines in PowerShell done in ~300 lines in AutoIt).

[seadoggie01]

I'm nowhere near as cool as water and JLogan3o13, but I use AutoIt scripts on a daily basis at work. I work in Accounting and use them to download invoices for wires, draft emails, extract data from PDFs, and I'm even working on a project right now that will replace a non-compliant server's function by parsing Bank of America data. I'm also running an AutoIt script right now to automate Perceptive Content and download 10K+ invoices for Audit. I've saved the company tons of hours and I only got yelled at once by IT for having my exe's marked as malware.

[Exit]

33 minutes ago, seadoggie01 said:

I only got yelled at once by IT for having my exe's marked as malware.

That wouldn't have happened if you had used Au3toCmd.

[seadoggie01]

Well, it didn't exist back then, so that's irrelevant. Maybe stop blatantly advertising your UDF and I'd be more willing to try it. Personally, I'd rather create a3x files and shortcuts to the AutoIt executable. This really isn't the place for talking about it anyways. OP wanted to talk about enterprise solutions.

[Dana86]

Thanks, Everyone! 

I've been going back and forth between VBA, Python & Autoit. I was contemplating switching everything over to all Python after the research phase since I have to use TensorFlow for the AI section of my program anyways... but Autoit is SOOOOOOOOOOOO much faster to write & so much more forgiving than Python(Even with Kite). We will probably keep the Python Autoit dynamic for production code!

[Neutro]

I've used autoit in different workplaces for over 15 years and it's great

The downsides i saw are :

- some AV softwares can generate false positives with it, it happend to me twice, but i just submitted a false positive report to the AV editor and they corrected it quickly,

- https://www.autoitscript.com/wiki/Decompiling_FAQ#Are_my_compiled_scripts_safe.3F => you can't use autoit with secret credentials and share the compiled version publicly,

- the generated compiled files sizes can be problematic when working in a low bandwidth environement.

But if you know this and take the appropriate actions according to them you're good to go

[BigDaddyO]

I use it every day at a large Healthcare company to create/run automated regression test.

Only reason we use AutoIt instead of UFT, Ranorex, or Python is because the majority of our applications can only be accessed within Citrix desktops that we can't get test suites or Python installed into.

We compile all our AutoIt scripts into .a3x files so AV doesn't delete them and store them on a network share.  To run from Citrix, we just have a bunch of shortcuts and doubleclick the one we want.

I've also created a management app for ALM, as well as my own version of LoginVSI.  which reminds me, LoginVSI actually uses AutoIt to run it's tests.