Windward Core Reviews

Ability to harness all the power of standard Office software (Word & Excel) to produce rich reports while at the same time easily connecting to my data sources. Very visual way of finding and linking data. Simple integration with .net & Java.

We are able to move report generation from the developer workload and give to less technical staff.

Initial learning curve seems steep as first - but it does 'click' into place after viewing a few of the free Webinars that Windward offer.

The ability for it to create static reports, which mostly replicate Word and Excel.

A part of our business is to produce static report which we give to our clients. This product serves this purpose very well.

The generation of PDF/Excel reports needs to replicate Word/Excel more closely with less required workarounds.

We have been using this product for 2 years.

When we first started using it we did - however, that was partly due to issues at our end.

Sometimes automated reports don't generate - seems to be completely random.

Yes, unfortunately as Word/Excel are used to generate the reports, it suffers from the same issues as 32-bit Word/Excel.

Very good, it has always been prompt and helpful.

Good, support has actually spent the time to try and figure out why a problem is happening. And sometimes if it requires a fix then they have pushed out the fix in the next version.

No.

In-house.

• Ease of use and design reporting templates is straightforward with usage of standard MicrosoftWord package.
• Does not require user a huge amount of time to learn all features and how to use a tool with MS package.
• Easily pulls out data from MySQL server into format that can be usable by our internal staff or external customers.

Reduced time in creating reports, as previously used MS Excel to manually create all reports

• Requires some work on page numbers (footer) in Word, as it places the page number in the center, when output in PDF page number is more to right than center.
• Outputting in PDF needs to be like for like with Word.
• Does not supporting text color in charts (does not allow changing legend text color).

I have used it for three months.

No deployment issues encountered.

The tool is stable enough.

No scalability issues encountered.

Great customer service: 10 of 10.

Excellent technical support: 10 of 10.

I haven't previously used a different solution myself, but the company used pure Excel for reporting and it was time consuming.

• Straightforward setup of tool

It was implemented in-house.

Good investment for reducing template/report design time/costs.

Great value; no other costs apart from template design time.

Unable to comment, as I wasn't at the company at that time.

It is a great tool, as using the standard MS package helps with learning, because it uses mostly MS Office functions to design templates.

We use AutoTag designer to build reports as well as formatted Word templates for clients that need to send out different information based off of personal.  This tool is great for tagging documents from different data sources such as XML, SQL, and other databases.  The tagging wizard is easy to use and helps with selecting the tags and implementing logic such as conditions, filtering and sorting.

Streamlined the process of quickly producing letters for our clients business that helped in getting patients what they needed quickly from their physicians.

Some drawbacks we have come across are getting the output formatting to match exactly how it is implemented within Word.  Not to the fault of AutoTag itself, but PDF output seems to display differently than Word output.  Even with this slight drawback, it has not stopped us from implementing rich tagged documents for our clients, and even when we run into these issues, Windward's support site and support team is on top of things, coming out with releases every 2 weeks with bug fixes and enhancements, even fixes that were submitted by us.  They are responsive and on top of their game.

The ability to generate a template from an MS Office application is invaluable, it makes things far easier.

Since we moved from using a self-built reporting engine to a hybrid engine which uses the Windward solution as it's primary reporting engine (some reports still have to be done the old way unfortunately, but that's the nature of our business), running out new reports is significantly quicker, meaning we can get new reports to customers far more quickly.

Autotag can be a little confusing for new users, however doing the training webinars will get them on their feet in no time.

About 9 months.

Not really, the integration into our systems was straightforward.

No, we've not had any problems at all.

No, we did create a synchronised and flattened reporting database which allows us to provide as many reports as necessary without impacting main system performance though.

Very good.

Very good.

We used an in-house solution which was tailored very much to what we required. However it wasn't flexible enough to provide us with what we needed without lots of code changes. Therefore we looked for alternatives.

It took a few days of self training and integration, but was straightforward.

In house.

Unknown at the moment, we'll see when customers next enter a renewal period.

The prices might look high, but they aren't that bad. Look at scout as well for a "per report" pricing model.

BIRT and JasperReport.

It's a good solution, which allows you to build reports quickly over multiple data sources. I would advise you to download a trial and take a look.

• There's less of a a learning curve than with other reporting tools and it has easy to design complex templates using the AutoTag Microsoft Office plugin.
• I can use Microsoft Office standard features with templates. This has reduced template development time on coding, layouts and formatting.
• We receive customer data in various formats and it is very convenient to pass the XML datasource to generate reports.
• Easy to integrate with our company product using Javelin Server RESTful web-services API.

Reduced design time for complex templates.

• Javelin Server improvements: the ability to change the datasource file path on run-time.
• AutoTag improvements: does not support dynamically changing headers and footers on Microsoft Office Word templates.

I've used it for four years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

10 out of 10 - excellent.

10 out of 10 - excellent, promptly responded to all our queries communicating between the UK and the US.

No solution was used previously.

Setup was straightforward using Javelin Server (Setup using IIS7 & SQL DB) and AutoTag – Microsoft Office 2010.

We implemented it in-house and we received support when required.

Excellent investment for reducing template designing cost. Could not provide percentage numbers.

Day to day cost – None apart from development time for new template design.

We also evaluated Jaspersoft Report Designer.

• It's easy to use
• Use standard Microsoft Office to design complex templates so you can utilize rich Microsoft Office formatting, layouts etc.

• Word and Excel template generation
• Ability to integrate with our application

Our reporting tool is now fully integrated with our application, appearing and behaving as part of the application.

Report layouts can be done by less technical staff.

Some graphing capability could be improved and differences in layout for different formats (Word, PDF, etc.).

3 years

No. Drop in the WAR and call the API.

None

We generate a fairly low volume of concurrent reports, so not an issue.

Excellent. Always got a response within hours and fixes or guidance quickly.

Excellent

Yes, we used Oracle BI Publisher. Windward integrates easier, has a better Word template builder (Publisher didn't have Excel or PowerPoint template builders), and better licensing options to suit us.

Simply drop in the WAR file. We had to do work on our end to secure the data we pass in to Windward.

In-house

We bought on a x number of reports generated per month basis, which suited us as we have a lot of infrequent users and monthly reports (a lot of reports are run within 1 or 2 days).

Pentaho and Oracle BI were the main contenders.

Out and IF tags

It was used to automatically generate documents/emails for printing and distribution. It would use an XML source passed by the system and then rendered into a static document.

Two that I found:

1. Was limited by XML path restrictions. There were a couple of times I wanted to do something in the formulas which was prohibited by XML path but okay to do in Excel and the product is sold as being able to do whatever Excel can do in terms of formulas.
2. The wiki is useful but it could be expanded so much more! I had to do so much translating from Excel -> Autotag where the wiki could have gone into more depth. Imagine something with more scope like the Microsoft Excel how to guides. Much more in depth and gives you various examples of how power Autotag can be.
   

I've used it for two and a half years.

Sometimes with the activation key.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Very good - I think they needed to be more up front of needing XYZ before you even submit as there was sometimes a bit and back and forth with questions around versions/correct XML etc.

Very good.

No previous solution used.

In-house.

Cannot comment accurately but it would be very good.

Be sure that you trial it and it meets your needs.