It is a dashboarding tool. We have had multiple use cases where we were providing the UI for our sales and marketing data. It was primarily used for report generation.
It was quite easy to use. The UI was basically drag-and-drop based. So, even if you were a beginner at coding software or something else, it would be easy to catch up on Dundas BI.
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 have used it for around two and a half years, but I don't work on it anymore.
It was majorly stable. There were some problems with the references that were getting generated in the tool.
It is license based. So, it depends on the number of licenses. We had around 40 or 50 developers using it.
We contacted them multiple times. When we had the references overlap issue, from a developer's perspective, it was not easy to understand what should be done in such a case. Also, for getting the data to Dundas BI, there were multiple ways. One option was through stored procedures, which was a little bit complicated. A lot of times, we had to contact them to debug if a stored procedure was being used in the background.
I was not involved in its setup.
I'm not aware of its cost. Its licensing was probably role-wise. Most of us had reader access, editor access, or developer access. For admin, there were certain restrictions. So, I'm assuming it had role-wise licensing.
If you do not have very complex use cases, it would be a good tool. If you have tables somewhere, you can just fetch the data directly from there. In such a case, it is easy to use, but if there is a lot of complexity involved in bringing the data, it is not recommended. For example, if your use case involves dynamic charting, I would not recommend it because in that case, you just end up saying, "We are sorry. This is not possible in this tool."
I would rate it a seven out of ten. Whatever functionality they're providing, they should improve that a little more. Based on people's requests, they can accommodate the changes and make the components that they have added support a little bit more.
