Windward Core Reviews

Our primary use case is solely for document generation. We generate contracts for one of our customers and us. The contract gets generated from a database of terms and conditions that are stored in a MySQL database. They are hundreds of pages typically with many products organized per category and the product definitions are in there. A three-page template can generate hundred-page contract documents, which is very handy.

We're generating documents on a desktop computer but we're planning to move it to a server-side generation. We have 3 designer seats so that three people can make edits to the template.

In addition to generating the Word document from the database, we generate dashboards that we look at in Excel and Tableau. It enables us to have tighter knowledge of a working process by virtue of those dashboards, which formerly had to be edited by hand.

The ultimate feature is the product it produces. The ROI around that saves hours and hours. It's probably about a hundred days per year. The time savings and the ability to turn it around quickly pleases our customers. 

In terms of functionality, you don't have to know SQL language and syntax to get SQL logic applied to the document. Windward's Wizard interface is quite nice in that respect. You can select the fields you want, put them in the order you want, sort them by the common criteria, and it converts that into SQL language for you that you can edit directly in SQL or update via the Wizard. It's very handy.

The layout and design capabilities are very strong. It leverages every aspect available in Word-native formatting. On top of that, you can apply number and date styles in the Windward per field attributes, which is very handy. Essentially, it's 100% compatible with Word formatting and then it goes over and above to let you have the additional formatting.

The quality of the layouts and designs takes advantage of all that Word has and allows you to make your document look exactly the way you want it to look.

It has the ability to design templates within the Microsoft Office suite. It's the tool that fits the hand nicely because Word is commonly used for formatting text and Windward supports that. It's a powerful combination.

This frees up data entry people, what we call office administrators, for other tasks. It frees them up for other more value-added tasks.

Before Windward, we were adding conditional content to documents all manually - cut and paste twice, once into Word, once into Excel, which is very tedious and error-prone. Windward definitely does reduce manual error. It's now programmatic and before it was manual and subject to error.

The licensing key is a little bit twitchy. I'd like to see more HTML formatting support in templates. It has a basic stock of HTML formatting capability, but it doesn't have a rich vocabulary. I have to work around that sometimes. 

The help documentation and blog posts are extensive, but not always up to date.

The error reports also need improvement. If you don't key it in right, it's a little hard to find the root cause. It gives you information as much as it can, but it doesn't really hone in and tell you explicitly what you should do to correct the problem. 

I have been using Windward for a year or so.

It's very stable.

We barely use a fraction of the overall power of the product and we're going to be looking at ways to utilize the product in additional use cases now that we have this first sequence in hand. It's not a question of performance. It returns your product within seconds and it's very satisfactory.

Now there's a total of three people who work with Windward in my company. It's two office administrators and myself.

We use it every other week for contract generation. It used to take multiple days but now it takes just minutes. We have ample room for growth in terms of using the software more often and for more use cases.

Their support is quite strong. They have an issue tracker and they follow up and get back to you with status updates and advise you if it's going to be a software update in the future, etc.

Before Windward, we were doing it all manually. 

The initial setup is as straightforward as it could be given the complexity of what it delivers. It took us nine months to set up but we weren't working on it 100% of the time. It was part-time.

Our strategy was first to do a proof of concept and demonstrations to warrant the investment in software. We had a trial license that helped me generate demos that were compelling and allowed us to approve the purchase order. Then we essentially demonstrated that we could emulate the manual method and therefore justify transitioning to the new method pretty rapidly. The next phase was to set up server-side processing.

I did the integration myself with the help of Windward support, which was a very strong aspect of their offering. 

The support was great and then I needed additional hand-holding, so to speak. They assigned a subject matter expert to work with me. That was absolutely wonderful in working through the various issues that I encountered and didn't quite understand. That additional consulting offering was very valuable and was very helpful to us.

For these administrators to spend their time doing more value-added work is very clearly a key takeaway from our implementation.

Pricing is a bit higher than normal desktop applications, but it's well worth it. The ROI is simple to understand and the monthly payment for an annual license is affordable and worth it.

I looked at Advantive. It had nowhere near the functionality and the support for the OpenOffice format that Windward had engineered over the years.

My advice to anybody considering this solution is to allocate enough time. Don't over-commit on deployment because just like data analytics, a big part of the challenge is to make sure your data schema is good and the data is cleansed and doesn't have issues inside the data itself. Start with some simple Windward templates, build your understanding of what the logic is required to deliver a certain result. There's some hard work involved to get exactly what you want, but the reward is fantastic.

I would rate Windward Core a ten out of ten.