AutoIT is enterprise ready!?
In IT everybody i meet always has something against AutoIT, this is for a obvious reason you don’t want to use recorded mouseclicks or sendkeys to install your applications unless there is really (no really!) no other option left.
In everyday usage i use AutoIT to create most parts of Login VSI, its perfect for emulating the user workloads because it works like a real user and because i dont have real programming skills the rest of VSI is also created in AutoIT script.
You would think a large company would do this a little different, maybe they would create the workloads in AutoIT scripts but creating the configuration GUI’s would be done much more professional…. Well VMWare dissagrees 
apparently.
Conclusion: +1 for the AutoIT team and –1 for VMware!
February 9th, 2010 - 09:11
Well, there are 2 reasons why I like AutoIT (and when of course).
1st is when I want to emulate user actions (click, typing etc…) or handle window detection…
2nd reason and that’s when it is interesting for enterprise is when I want to have executable that will run on different systems. Ability of AutoIt to compile script to executable with embedded runtime can be lifesaver in this case – it will simply run everywhere. We had lengthy discussion about this with Jeffrey Snower back in 2005 with regards to Powershell – conclusion was that Posh won’t support it, because there is no easy way to update files in executable itself (and from this perspective, AutoIt can be potentially dangerous).
Martin
February 15th, 2010 - 16:12
AutoIT is cool, but maybe you want to checkout VTASK as well (www.vtaskstudio.com). At first we used Vtask as a last resort, but the scripters here use it now to combine tasks and scripts into one executable.
February 15th, 2010 - 16:51
Just one thing, it doesnt look as free ($$$) as AutoIT
August 11th, 2010 - 15:12
I use autoit in my work at a IT dept of a Hospital. Why? we at IT have a 8:00-17:00 working day, but there are always work. Sometimes, the running processes just need to be reset (you know, stopping and launching again some application), but letting “normal” users accessing to the main server directly and doing things is not… er… well, my boss doesn’t like that idea ^^
So what to do? we can let them call us by phone at 2AM, get up, connect VPN and so on, or we can just make a simple AutoIt Script with one button “reset service”, compiled for the users. Internally the script opens an WMI connection to server with admin’s rights and does the work. But at anytime the users need admin rights nor they can “break” nothing.
It is also very comfortable for annoying things such as “open FTP with user and pass, upload this file, download this various files, concatenate them, and set the filename to the today’s date”, manually doing them is lot of work (for users
but by scripting is one-time double-click.