Sr. Systems Analyst at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
Mar 31, 2021
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.
Systems Support Specialist at a construction company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
Dec 23, 2019
I do coding, so I often think that it would be nice to have subroutines, in separate templates, that could be shared among other templates. However, I understand the limitations of Word Field codes. I have to deal with VERY long lists of properties contained in our XMLs and it would be nice if Windward offered a way to alphabetize this property list. I understand that we could alphabetize our XML and this would happen automatically, but I think this would be a useful tweak for many users. At least if they have to deal with a lot of data like we do.
Vice President of Product Management at Baker Hill Corporation
Real User
Aug 28, 2019
Any time that we have wanted something, Windward has been right there to build it. I would have a hard time saying what they need to improve on. What I would say is that the industry is going to be looking for continued flexibility in terms of filtering, nesting, and building more complex, almost business-intelligence-type rules and reports. What we're going to need to see is that narrowing of the gap between the analytics and management in terms of what they're going to want to see and view. The more sophisticated customer is going to want some of that information shared back with them. That's going to be an area where there'll be some potential improvement. But the Windward team is constantly monitoring that. They've got this under control. We feel we're in really good shape with them. One of the things we've continued to hear is that our users talk specifically about AutoTag and more concepts around filtering, nesting, and sorting; more flexibility around that. Windward is pushing that envelope and they're doing a great job with it. So we're happy with it.
Their PDF needs improvement. We've run into some issues when we tried to generate a Word document. If we try to generate the same document in PDF, sometimes it doesn't look exactly the same. We have gone back to Windward support a couple of times on a few issues, e.g., we had some issues with reports that had barcodes on them. The barcode wasn't displaying properly. It was displaying as a skewed image as opposed to an actual barcode. Therefore, we worked with Windward support, having some daily calls with them. Then, within the next release, they were able to resolve the issue. They even gave us a pre-release, so we could implement it into our code before the actual official release on the website. It would be nice to have some sort of workflow capability within the product. Anytime you generate a document, nine out of ten times there is something which precedes that document, whether it's entering parameters in, e.g., if I'm requesting the status report for a project. The first thing that I usually want from a status perspective is which project is the status report for and which week is it for, as those are some of the things that I have to supply before I can generate a document. From a workflow perspective, it would be nice to say, "This project belongs to this person, and this person is okay with me pulling information out of this document for whatever need I have." From a workflow perspective, I would like a wizard interface that goes step-by-step, like a questionnaire, where there are a bunch of things that you have to answer, "Yes or no," before it knows what to do or how to produce the document. Right now, we write our own custom UI for this.
It is a very good product. It does everything we need it to do. The only thing I can think of, that we'd like it to do, would be the ability to "burst out" reports, meaning one section of a report could be sent out as an email to a manager of a department, say, without having to run multiple reports to do it. As it sits now, we have to do multiple reports to do it.
It would be nice to have a black-and-white, ideal setup for servers, to maximize capabilities. We went through a lot of scenarios to get something that is scalable. An ideal AWS-package server setup could have saved us a lot of time. But I understand this is very company specific.
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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 do coding, so I often think that it would be nice to have subroutines, in separate templates, that could be shared among other templates. However, I understand the limitations of Word Field codes. I have to deal with VERY long lists of properties contained in our XMLs and it would be nice if Windward offered a way to alphabetize this property list. I understand that we could alphabetize our XML and this would happen automatically, but I think this would be a useful tweak for many users. At least if they have to deal with a lot of data like we do.
Any time that we have wanted something, Windward has been right there to build it. I would have a hard time saying what they need to improve on. What I would say is that the industry is going to be looking for continued flexibility in terms of filtering, nesting, and building more complex, almost business-intelligence-type rules and reports. What we're going to need to see is that narrowing of the gap between the analytics and management in terms of what they're going to want to see and view. The more sophisticated customer is going to want some of that information shared back with them. That's going to be an area where there'll be some potential improvement. But the Windward team is constantly monitoring that. They've got this under control. We feel we're in really good shape with them. One of the things we've continued to hear is that our users talk specifically about AutoTag and more concepts around filtering, nesting, and sorting; more flexibility around that. Windward is pushing that envelope and they're doing a great job with it. So we're happy with it.
Their PDF needs improvement. We've run into some issues when we tried to generate a Word document. If we try to generate the same document in PDF, sometimes it doesn't look exactly the same. We have gone back to Windward support a couple of times on a few issues, e.g., we had some issues with reports that had barcodes on them. The barcode wasn't displaying properly. It was displaying as a skewed image as opposed to an actual barcode. Therefore, we worked with Windward support, having some daily calls with them. Then, within the next release, they were able to resolve the issue. They even gave us a pre-release, so we could implement it into our code before the actual official release on the website. It would be nice to have some sort of workflow capability within the product. Anytime you generate a document, nine out of ten times there is something which precedes that document, whether it's entering parameters in, e.g., if I'm requesting the status report for a project. The first thing that I usually want from a status perspective is which project is the status report for and which week is it for, as those are some of the things that I have to supply before I can generate a document. From a workflow perspective, it would be nice to say, "This project belongs to this person, and this person is okay with me pulling information out of this document for whatever need I have." From a workflow perspective, I would like a wizard interface that goes step-by-step, like a questionnaire, where there are a bunch of things that you have to answer, "Yes or no," before it knows what to do or how to produce the document. Right now, we write our own custom UI for this.
It is a very good product. It does everything we need it to do. The only thing I can think of, that we'd like it to do, would be the ability to "burst out" reports, meaning one section of a report could be sent out as an email to a manager of a department, say, without having to run multiple reports to do it. As it sits now, we have to do multiple reports to do it.
It would be nice to have a black-and-white, ideal setup for servers, to maximize capabilities. We went through a lot of scenarios to get something that is scalable. An ideal AWS-package server setup could have saved us a lot of time. But I understand this is very company specific.