With Dundas BI, we do not have end-users apart from the developers. End-users do not find it easy to create their own reports. Most of the implementations I have seen require a developer team for creating the visuals, and they then give them to end-users. A self-serve part where end-users or business users can create their own reports would help in terms of the adoption of Dundas BI. Currently, business users find it difficult to work with Dundas BI because there are so many settings that they don't know what they need to do. Even when a developer starts working on Dundas BI, he needs to spend at least one month or so getting used to the functionalities of Dundas BI. Even then, it is not easy to remember where or how they made a certain property change. It takes at least one month for a developer to get acquainted with it.

Working with the color palette is difficult in Dundas BI. They can work on different color palettes and make them organized and user-friendly. It would help a long way. Most of the time, the users face challenges in assigning colors to the fields that they have created or to the dimensions and measures in a chart.

Dundas can further reduce the number of settings they have. When you create any chart in Dundas, you get a lot of features to control each setting, which is pretty useful for BI, but for end-users, it is difficult to identify the exact settings to change a property. 

I would love it if some of the options come pre-selected. If some of the settings are set to best practices by default, it will be helpful.

Whenever we have any issues, the error messages that we get in Dundas BI are not very helpful in identifying the root cause.

Making these changes will bring a lot of change to the end-user experience.

It lacked advanced features in a few areas. For example, dynamic charting had limitations. We had a use case where we had to generate a report based on the user selection. If we had a dropdown with 10 fields, a user can select what he or she wants to view at that moment. Even though such a feature was there, it had very limited functionality. I don't remember the exact thing that it failed to do, but we could not really do a lot. They had not developed it completely. 

For every object, references are generated, but sometimes, there was a problem with the references overlapping each other. Everything would go off. It would stop working, and then from the admin side, people had to do something to bring it up again.

They could maybe provide some support to directly use JavaScript. This will allow those developers or UI people who are well aware of JavaScript to code. Currently, there is an option to code, but you need to use Dundas Script. Dundas Script is based on JavaScript, but it is not exactly JavaScript. Finding things on Dundas Script is not that easy because the documentation that is available online is not great. They have online documentation where they have used Dundas Script to get the objects and other things, but that's more of a sample to show you how to do something, such as creating a text box via scripting, in case you do not want to use the drag-and-drop functionality. That kind of documentation is available, but it doesn't really support JavaScript.

I think the customer experience could be improved. I don't always want to have to contact vendor support to get my query sorted out; it takes a huge amount of time to raise a request. If I could find some answers online, user forums, some example dashboards and a video about creating dashboards, that would be amazing. As an additional feature, I'd like to see the ability to link the dashboards together. My current preference would be to work with Tableau or Power BI because they're more user intuitive and both have a good user interface. I don't find Dundas BI so easy to work with. It's the data integration aspect that is causing trouble. 

Dundas BI really has all the features that we need to get the job done. Where it doesn't, we can still use the APIs they offer to get there. 

There are some minor things that would make the tool easier and faster to use, however, over the last couple of releases, a lot of those have already been realized. One example for this would be that I can select a filter to see what visualizations are bound to it yet I cannot select a visualization and see what filters are connected to it. This is not preventing me from creating what I need. Still, it would make it more convenient. 

It would be helpful if Dundas made the UI more user-friendly like the leading tools and decreased the learning curve. It should be simpler for a beginner to build dashboards.

The API they have can do just about anything, but their documentation on the API and examples are only for some of the basics. They need to and are working on filling in those gaps. It is understandable that they have not yet documented everything that you can do with the API because there is a lot you can do with it.

The addition of funnel charts to the visualization options would be great. We have not been able to default a data grid to be collapsed by groups. This would be a big help for some dashboards requiring lots of details on the screen

One feature I would like to see added is funnel charts. Dundas has the ability to modify a bar chart to mimic a funnel, or to ingest 3rd part visuals.  But both feel a little clunky to use.  An out of the box funnel chart would be preferred.

Some native functionality to 'write back' to a specific field in a database would be a welcome change as well.  Dundas has the ability to create a form using text boxes that can be used as variables in a stored procedure for writing back to a SQL backend. This works, but our users have not liked the experience.  What our users prefer is a grid of data with the cells being editable, allowing them to update data from within the grid.  

This product needs incremental in-memory data loading. (We have heard that this is to be included in the new version, 3.0.)

As with any software there are features that are not operating as expected or that could be improved.  For our organization the pieces of Dundas BI that need improvement are as follows:

1) It is currently not possible to connect a data cube built in the BI system to another data cube built in the BI system;

2) The system does not support two year Fiscal Year notation (ie. FY 20-15-2016 can only be recorded as either FY 2015 or FY 2016);

3) On some of the user interfaces, such as the "join" interface, it is not possible to cancel out of the screen without making any changes.

For a developer, it is really annoying that the Solution Explorer is not visible unless you have something checked out. You have a home screen which shows all objects but it's difficult to identify which is which and you end up checking out the wrong object.

Another place where things can be improved is to identify what Metric Sets are used by the dashboard. You end up with auto-generated Metric Sets and there are no properties provided for them (i.e. what the base Metric Set is).

Not much. Documentation improvements or additions to help with the learning curve when starting with BI, but once you get in the groove it is fantastic and makes me highly productive and provides my customers with beautiful data visualizations without very much effort on my part.

I would love to see more functions built in inside the application, instead of being scripted. They already did some of that in the new release, version 5, like forecasting, trend  lines, etc., and I would love to see more of these kinds of calculations, which we used to do it by scripts before.

Some wonky web-based issues but nothing serious.

A few more different data visualizations wouldn't hurt. But I've just read from Dundas that version 3.0 will have some good surprises in that matter!  

I have no complaints. They work fast and have major releases on a predictable schedule.  Customer service has been exceptional, and they have worked with us as partners to solve bugs that have been discovered.

More of the same! They still need to add some visualisations and could continue to improve the UI to allow users to easily find what they need within the many different options.

Export to PowerPoint is really poor.

Your changes are not always saved, which can be very frustrating.

Matrix tables. Add them in !!! Currently, they don't do that, and it's hard to create some BI reports due to this.

Out of box connection to web services to read its data.