Diplomat MFT Update July 2022:

CLICK HERE FOR DIPLOMAT MFT v9.1 

CLICK HERE FOR REPLIWEB MFT REPLACEMENT 

CLICK HERE FOR WORKFLOW AUTOMATION SOFTWARE

Diplomat MFT 8.3 Release

In our continuing efforts to deliver software that solves real-world customer problems at the best value in the market, we are proud to announce the release of Diplomat MFT 8.3!

The team here at Coviant Software has been listening and responding to our customers, and quickly bringing features and bug fixes to the product.  More than ever, Diplomat MFT stands apart from the other software offerings in the Managed File Transfer (MFT) market space by combining superb power and flexibility with deep experience in file transfer workflows, while keeping the solution appropriately priced for our customers.  The result is a solution that easily provides the best value in the MFT market.

New Features That Make File Transfers Awesome

Here are some new features in Diplomat MFT 8.3 that you will surely find as awesome as I do:

Coviant Software has partnered with Accolm to bring their , “BAM” (“Business Activity Monitor”) to Diplomat MFT.  I have worked with Accolm over many years and I am pleased to be partnering with them to bring our customers this excellent solution.  With BAM, you can easily monitor the file transfer activities of Diplomat MFT from any web browser.  You can inspect the overall file transfer status, and view individual steps of each transaction.  You can even set up Service Level Agreements (SLAs) so that your team can have early warning of missed transmission windows.  The BAM product is very helpful to every operator of a Diplomat MFT server.

Email notifications have been an important part of Diplomat MFT for many years.  These email notifications provide a simple way for Diplomat MFT administrator to alert the IT department or business unit when file transfers succeed or fail.  Some customers even use the email alerts to feed their internal ticketing systems.  We have noticed, however, that the use of email notifications is being overshadowed by team messaging tools, chief among which are Slack and Microsoft Teams.  To better empower the modern IT workforce, Diplomat MFT now supports sending notifications to a Slack or Teams channel with a simple tick of a checkbox.  No need to build custom scripts or any custom coding.

Although Diplomat MFT has a long history in “old school”  file transfer protocols like FTP and SFTP, for more than 5 years Diplomat MFT has also been helping customers orchestrate and secure the file transfer workflows to and from multiple Cloud Storage vendors (Amazon S3, Azure Files, Google Cloud Storage, Oracle Cloud Storage, Citrix Sharefile, Dropbox, and Box).  We are happy to announce that Diplomat MFT 8.3 also supports any storage solution that implements the .  This means that Diplomat MFT brings its simple and secure file transfer automation capabilities to customers who wish to move files to or from object storage solutions other than Amazon S3, both in the Cloud and on-premises.

Biscom provides an excellent SaaS-based solution for sending and collaborating on files, called .  With a simple web interface, it provides a secure alternative to email that avoids email attachment size limits.  With Diplomat MFT’s Biscom Transit support, this process can now be automated to reduce the cost (and risk for error) of running manual processes.

File Transfer Visibility

One of the most important activities of a Diplomat MFT administrator/operator is to ensure that the scheduled file transfer workflows are working.  And, when they are not, to triage the situation quickly so that corrective measures can be taken.  Diplomat MFT has had a long history of facilitating this file “operational stewardship” with email alerts, log files, and audit databases.  But email notifications can become overwhelming, and digging through reams of log data or huge databases can be a daunting task.

Diplomat MFT 8.3 improves visibility over the file transfer workflows to make operational stewardship even easier.  provides an intuitive web dashboard for at-a-glance status of the Diplomat MFT system.  Or you can dig into transaction reports with rich filter capabilities.  You can export results to CSV files.  You can define SLAs to ensure that business workflows generate alerts when file transfers that should happen do not actually happen.

Teams and Slack notifications will improve operational stewardship as well.  These days, email is passé — monitoring your inbox all day and filtering the important emails from operational alerts is a waste of brain cycles.  Slack or Teams can provide a dedicated channel for Diplomat MFT alerts, making filtering a much easier process.  Both tools also offer a rich set of integrations / bots, opening up a new world of possibilities in reacting to Diplomat MFT error notifications.  We have already started using these notifications here at Coviant Software to notify our teams about product release and hotfix uploads.

Object Storage Versatility

File transfers needs continue to evolve.  Where FTP and SFTP once dominated, the Cloud has grown to be a significant factor in file transfers.  Amazon S3 object storage revolutionized reliable, cheap storage, and Diplomat MFT supports many customer workflows to and from S3 buckets. For example, a financial services firm regularly sending gigabyte data files to S3 storage as the first step in a data pipeline involving 5Tran and Snowflake.

But Amazon S3 is not the only player in the market, and if you haven’t looked for alternatives recently, you might be missing out.  Many of these offer S3 API compatible endpoints, meaning that the file transfer protocol is interoperable with Amazon S3.  For example, is a hot Cloud Storage vendor (pun intended) that offers the reliability and scale of Amazon S3 at a significantly cheaper price, especially considering that they charge no fee for data egress nor API calls. For situations that involve both uploads and downloads, the price difference of Wasabi over Amazon can be quite significant.  Other Cloud Storage vendors offering S3 compatibility include OpenStack Swift, BackBlaze, and Cloudian.

On-premises storage solutions, too, offer S3 API compatibility for object storage.  These provide the speed and security of on-premises storage solutions, combined with the flexibility of the S3 API interface.  Examples of such solutions include Ceph, Minio, Carringo, Scality.

Diplomat MFT 8.3 extends support for the S3 transport protocol to all of these vendor solutions.  You can choose whether the S3 transfers are Amazon S3 with super simple configuration, or you can now choose “S3 Compatible” endpoints.  In this case, you need only specify the URL to the S3 API endpoint and the region value, and your file transfer workflows will connect to any S3 API compatible endpoint.  Transfers will be scheduled, secured, audited, archived, and alerted in the same fashion that all Diplomat MFT workflows are handled.

Occam’s Razor

Here at Coviant Software, we marvel at other vendors’ claims of “ease of use.”  We hear from customers how “simple workflows” turn into multi-step, quasi-coding exercises for other vendors’ solution.  Our Diplomat MFT can accomplish the same workflow with a but a few built-in checkboxes and configuration fields.  I scratch my head and wonder how those other vendors can charge so much more for their solution, and still make their customers work hard to build their file transfer workflows (sometimes even charging for professional services to build the workflows, or train the users to build them).

We firmly believe in the principle of :  “plurality should not be posited without necessity” — or, if you prefer the original Latin, “pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate” (Mr. Hicks, my high school Latin teacher, will be pleased that  I finally used those 3 years of Latin for something!).  A long time ago I used the a less fancy form that resonated with my development teams quite well:  “Give me a $5 solution to a $5 problem.”

What that means to us is that we build our solution with a laser focus on the file transfer workflows that are most common to our customers, and make them as easy as possible.  To us, the “flexibility” offered by other vendors is superfluous and causes more time and effort than is necessary.  Need to transfer files from a Cloud Storage service to an internal file server?  No need to create a quasi-coding orchestration consisting of multiple steps, tracking variables, and configuring multiple screens, each of which has its own error handling logic.  Using Diplomat MFT, you can simply specify source, destination, and a few simple options along the way (like PGP, notifications, ZIP/UNZIP, and so on).  One screen with easy to define options that cover all the major workflows you will encounter.

This also means we often offer more comprehensive capabilities than others. A perfect example is SFTP Keyboard Interactive Authentication (KIA). Our Diplomat MFT one of the only sftp automation solutions to provide interactive SFTP authentication submission in automated tasks. And you don’t have to do anything extra to enable it! It’s built in. What good is an expensive blank-canvas “framework” you have to construct your processes in when it can’t even cover all the fundamental bases you didn’t even know you needed until you get stuck? We use our decades of experience to anticipate your needs and address them before you realize it’s a problem.

In other words, we provide just enough configuration necessary for your file transfer workflows, without positing unnecessary plurality.  Diplomat MFT 8.3 adds capabilities, but not complexity, to your file transfer workflows.

Upgrade or Try a Free Trial of Diplomat MFT 8.3 Today!

Let us know what you think.  We would be happy to help you with a free trial of our software, or present a demonstration of our product.  Let us help you remove the burden of file transfer automation, and make you better operational stewards of your business!

Download a free trial of Diplomat, or request a demo and see for yourself.

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