Windward Core Reviews

Transforming our reports, that are natively in JSON format, to have a human-readable format associated with them.

It completely offloaded a needed component of our platform, providing tools that we would have had to develop internally. We didn't need to reinvent the wheel for a part our business that is ancillary.

The engine being able to sit inside of our firewall is the most important feature.

The design tool, with all of its features and sample output fidelity tests, and being able to work with JSON data and output PDF and HTML, were also both crucial. 

The ability for users to have design and layout control is also critically important. Without this ability, procuring report designs would represent a huge bottleneck. Report design tools also enable upsell opportunities for customized reports, with quick turnaround times.

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.

Less than one year.

No issues with stability, outside of any stress testing.

We have encountered some scalability issues, but these seem to be due to unknown server and environment setups. We have done a lot of testing and trial and error to improve this, which has been going very well.

The technical support was and is phenomenal. We always get the answers we need from them and they are always willing to go above and beyond to ensure everything is working properly. 

We previously used a solution that merely transformed HTML into PDF. We still had to transform the JSON data into HTML format. This process was slow, and design- and resource-intensive. Getting fidelity feedback on changes and updates was extremely slow.

Our company is built on producing data fast and with fluidity, but providing a means to display the data in a human readable format was a huge bottleneck for us. We needed something that could keep pace with our data development.

I was responsible for championing it and convincing the CEO to make the switch to Windward. I decided to set up a prototype using Windward that mimicked our platform’s exact workflow, to show the viability of the product and process. The Windward prototype workflow was completed and demoed to the CEO in a single afternoon.

The ability for Windward to be licensed as a black-box and to be retained in our servers behind our firewall was an absolute must in our business model. Without this, licensing would not be possible.

We did not evaluate other products specifically, because we had a deal-breaker checklist of what was required. Of all the products we went through, Windward was the only one to meet all the requirements.

We recently have moved into production with our service and platform. So far I would give it a solid nine out of 10. It has met every aspect we needed it to meet, flawlessly.

We design and produce risk insight reports on consumers' financial accounts. We have developed an internal "modular" architecture of our data and reports where one master report template can output any number of permutations and combinations, based on dynamic, modular inputs.

We connect to JSON objects and currently output HTML and PDF.

We are multi-tenant based, so we need to be able to sustain high volume without sacrificing page rate. We are still in the process of optimizing this aspect, but our current benchmark tests should be enough for the short- and mid-term.

We choose to purchase a packaged solution because we needed to have design tools that require minimum skill level, for scalability and quicker turnaround times, for newly designed reports.

Look past Windward's marketing/sales process (those areas needs improvement). The product itself is amazing.

I create Windward templates for the Otis Elevator company. These templates are for complicated specifications and proposal documents that our sales reps use for selling elevators. The end result of these Windward templates are documents that perfectly fit the concept of "putting your right foot forward."

Our primary use is for the sales reps to build these documents, based upon XML files created in the background on our document server. Our secondary use is for the public to be able to generate elevator specifications from Otis.com.

We used another process for doing this, previous to Windward that was absolutely terrible and support was practically non-existent. The documents used by our sales force are critical and examined very closely by our customers. They need to foster confidence in our product and company. 

Previously, our reps had to spend a lot of time tweaking/fixing an imperfect document and fussing with nested tables. Thanks to Windward, our documents need very few tweaks and are usually "customer-ready" right out of the box. Most of the tweaks are only to make the documents unique to an office. 

One of the valuable features is Functions, which helps make it possible to generate grammatically correct sentences from XML data.

The quick preview is another useful feature. Our previous system required a sever upload before changes could be previewed.

With Windward, we are able to build tables where elevator floors are represented "right-side-up," with the first floor being at the bottom of the table and the highest floor, being at the top. This reverse sequence of rows is something our previous software company said was impossible. Because of this, our reps were forced to rearrange the word tables, themselves.

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.

We have been using Windward Studios for three years.

I consider it to be very stable. I have had a few issues in other places because of the fact that we are using a 64-bit operating system, but still using a 32-bit version of Microsoft Office. The Windward team informed me that this is responsible for infrequent Word crashes that occur while building Windward templates. However, these crashes are only a minor nuisance.

Our elevator specs and proposals are very complicated documents; however, I have barely used the full spectrum of what Windward offers. I've got some ideas for using Windward to assist in generating some of my training PowerPoints. 

Windward product support is very good and the response time is excellent! Normally, I'll get an email response, with a solution, within an hour or the end of the day at the latest. I like to send detailed emails explaining my problem and they return with very thorough answers, even suggesting alternative solutions.

We used another solution prior to this one, and it had almost no tech support. Font styles, sizes, and paragraph spacing would change, for no apparent reason. Sometimes, the field codes would appear, instead of the data that they were supposed to bring in.

The utilization of Windward was very straightforward and I had a very good relationship with a few of the Windward support staff. Any complexity was purely a result from our end, as might be imagined when considering that I'm just the North American counterpart and all of this has to be coordinated with many servers across different countries.

It was a little of both. In-house, the offshore team had to make sure that the location where the templates would be uploaded allowed proper connection to the latest XMLs and that the Windward templates could be discerned from the older, non-Windward, templates. 

The vendor team was the Windward support team, itself. This started out with a combination of teleconferences/NetMeetings and evolved into my asking questions, via email. Most of my questions were answered within an hour.

This would be hard to put a number on. Our Proposal and Specification documents, generated by Windward templates, are right on the front-line of sales, making them critical documents that will either give a good or bad impression of the Otis Elevator Company. Just about anything that makes this process run better is worth significant investment.

I created a VBA version that would build Excel spreadsheets, formatted so that PDFs could be created that looked identical to what might have been created in our old software. However, many users needed to have Word-formatted versions of these documents. 

This was purchased by those higher up the food chain than myself. However, the Windward process works very well and is very reliable. There is a learning curve, but it's not too bad, especially considering all that it does.

There are plenty of tutorials, but nothing teaches better than actually creating documents and getting feedback from the users. Nearly all of the problems I have encountered were solved quickly and were the result of me doing something wrong, rather than a problem with Windward.

Simple and intuitive with a focus on business teams being able to support/maintain reports. It was important for us to aggregate data from external disparate systems and combine it onto a single report. Windward has no limitations on the number of data sources or number of pages a template can have, which made it the obvious choice. Leveraging native capabilities of MS Office (i.e., formatting text, page numbering, resizing images, etc.) saved us a ton of time that we would have spent coding on other platforms.

Windward helped automate reports which otherwise would have needed IT to create and maintain. We went from an IT driven task to a user driven initiative.

It has the ability to easily integrate into existing apps with little coding. If you know how to use MS Office, you can create a report.

• It needs the ability to drill down in a single report (i.e., interactive) into data. 
• The next release could benefit from a cloud-based environment.

Technical support is one of the bet I have seen. Very responsive and very quick to help resolve issues.

Initial setup is straighforward. Typical setup takes about 10-15 min.

We are using Windward to generate documents, as a solution in our application. We have a software editing application and we are using Windward to generate documents for our customers. Our customers are financial institutions and each customer implementation is a use case.

For our customers, it is important to have all the details related to a document, that they can find everything in one document. In addition to that, it is valuable for them to be able to export to it to Word. It is a solution that enables them to have everything in one place and accessible at one time.

Our company is using Windward because it works well with Microsoft Office. You can easily export to Word and the document is usable in Word. Whenever you export, you don't lose many features and you can treat it or process it as a Word document. This is not possible with other tools. It is easy to design templates within the Office Suite.

With this feature, it gives our clients the flexibility of using the document. We could, of course, design a very good document, but if it is only a PDF it can't used further. There isn't the flexibility to add some comments or tags, etc. With Windward, it is flexible in terms of design and, later on, the user can use it as a Word document. Everybody is familiar with Word.

In addition, the customization is important.

It has helped reduce costs. Maybe not in a direct way, helping us, but we are helping our customers to reduce their costs.

The most valuable feature is the Rich Text or TinyMCE in fields. For example, you have a text field but it is not a regular text field, it is a link. Inside this link, you can copy/paste everything: images, text, and tables together. After saving this field, you can pull it into the document.

This is valuable because our customers are processing credit applications. When they are dealing with the credit application for a corporate customer - for a loan to build a factory, for example - they need to follow up on the construction progress. This very important for the relationship manager, whenever he is doing client visits, to take pictures of the project and to document the credit application well. It is valuable for him to put everything in the credit application: a picture of the building, a copy of the building plan, financial analysis, how much the construction costs, etc.

About six months ago, we raised the possibility of improving the way they manage HTML 5. Sometimes, when you insert a lot of data in the data source, you get an error because it is not managing HTML 5 features well.

I believe they have addressed this in later versions of their product.

It is stable. When you download a version and you test, it is stable and it works fine. 

You pay for scalability because there are limitations. You are limited in the number of reports generated per day. So it is scalable, you just have to pay more.

We have used technical support and it is good. Sometimes, to reproduce the bug or the issue, they ask for the data source and other details, which are not easy to provide. It might help if they created a users' lab where we could try to reproduce the problem, rather than asking for the database.

We used Crystal Reports previously. We switched because, at that time, as far as I know, Crystal Reports didn't properly manage the TinyMCE field component.

The initial setup is straightforward. You just download it and click next, next, next. It took about ten to 15 minutes to deploy.

We installed it ourselves. We didn't use any external people.

The only problem with the pricing of Windward is the limitation on the number of reports generated. It is costly in that sense. If you want to increase, you have to pay more, based on the number of reports generated per day. 

We compared Windward vs Crystal Reports, and their pricing structure is not the same. With Crystal Reports, you buy a license at one point in time, and that's it.

You need to do training with Windward, and to test it to make sure that it is meeting your expectations in terms of document generation.

In our company, we have about 20 people working on document design. When we deliver our solution containing the Windward component, there is a big number of users. We have around ten clients generating 500 reports per day. We need one person per project who does both design and deployment.

As long as we have new projects and clients, our use of Windward will increase.

I would rate Windward at eight out of ten. It's not a ten because it doesn't manage, at least through our version, 15.1.69, HTML 5. Also, if you raise an issue with support, if they can't confirm it they won't help you. They just say, "If you want, we can route you to our Professional Services team," and if we need more information they charge for it.

Report generation.

It's tough to give you an example of how it's improved things, because I really wasn't doing anything of this nature prior to implementing the solution. So it's hard for me to give you an example of that. I can say that, in implementing this solution, I was able to meet and exceed the project goals I had towards the deliverable, and what that deliverable would look like.

The two features that I like the best are the ability to generate Word and Excel documents, and the ability to create my templates directly inside those software sets.

It's absolutely critical for me as a user to have design and layout control, because all of my reports are very, very customized. I have to have control over the ability to generate and to control what they look like.

There are some - and they've made some positive changes to this already - but there is always room for improvement in the speed, especially with the complex, multi-line Excel spreadsheets. They made some improvements in the last version that are quantum-fold faster than when I first started. But there is always room for improvement there. You always want reports faster and faster. Everybody wants instantaneous reports, doesn't want have to wait. Anything that can be done to speed that up would be an enhancement, for me. 

The other thing that I have requested that would be nice, there are some Excel formatting things that you lose when you implement a template: some default Excel validation scripts, macros. You could create them in Excel if you were just using Excel, but in creating a template that generates a report, some of those validation things are lost. You just don't have the ability to create them before they are spit out. That would be a nice enhancement to see.

I have not noticed any stability issues. It's a very stable platform, once you get your template built.

Now, in learning to build the templates, you will experience some learning curves, learning what works and what doesn't, and how you have to, like in any software, implement things. But once you have a stable template built, it's extremely stable.

Since I've only been implementing it for a year, we haven't pushed it to its limits yet. I'll probably know more next year, and in the years to come, how scalable it is.

It seems as though it's going to be completely scalable for me, at this point. It doesn't seem like I'm going to hit a limitation for resources or anything like that. But again, this might be a hard thing for me to answer since we only implemented a year ago. I implemented it as a pilot last year for a new project, to prove that it was possible to do. It was very successful. And now it's starting to be scaled this year a little bit further. In the years to come, we'll continue to scale it further and further. It is possible I could hit some scaling thresholds it won't scale past. But at this point I'm not aware of them.

I have used tech support on a number of occasions. I haven't done any official training on the product, I just use their Wiki page and send questions to support as I need them. I would always have an answer within 24 hours. It's not always the answers you want but, like all support, it's the answer you get.

The only report generation I had done prior to this, was creating our own HTML reports. It was very time consuming and tedious. I wanted to find a software set that would allow me to generate Excel and Word reports that would look the way I wanted them to look. I am a non-programmer, so I needed a software set that would allow me, as a non-technical programmer, to be able to accomplish that.

I did evaluate building a custom solution, but the cost of producing reports of this complexity, and building it myself from scratch, would have taken me three to possibly even 10 times the amount of time it took me to create these templates. And instead of creating them myself, I would have had to employ developer resources to create them. The cost would have been quantum-fold more than what we've invested in the Windward solution.

It was extremely straightforward. It's pretty much out-of-the-box. If you can use Excel or Word you can figure out how to create Windward template.

There is a learning curve, as with all things with complex pieces, when you want to get a lot more detailed. But we, with no official training, have been able to create some what I feel are pretty robust reports.

For what you're getting, it's an extremely good value.

I implemented, I believe they call it a single-core license. It's working just fine for me. I can see where, at some point, I'm going to want to upgrade and invest in a multi-core license, because I want to expand this into other product offerings, because it does such a good job.

This is my first foray into reporting software. I did evaluate Crystal Reports, and some other well known reporting software. It just seemed to me that Windward would be easier. And I loved the idea of being able to generate templates myself in the programs that I wanted to have as the ultimate reporting tool, like Word and Excel. That was the selling point to me. I hadn't used any in the past, so I had nothing to compare it to. That was my decision-maker, that's why I went with Windward.

At this point we really only have four or five different templates. We're generating documents through a Web portal. There are lots of documents being created but they're all being created off of four or five different templates. But the templates we've created are pretty complex. We're generating directly from a Web-hosted SQL database.

If you like to play with software and learn it for yourself, you would be just fine doing as I did, and going through the Wiki pages. But if you have immediate project needs, I could see that consulting and training would be extremely useful for it. It took me, probably, three or four months to get my reports where I really wanted them, and learn all the nuances of the software. But I like to play with software and I wanted to learn it that way. That was a choice I made. 

That would be my only advice: To evaluate whether you may want additional training and consulting services to go with the purchase.

I don't think I will ever give anybody a 10 out of 10 because there are always slight areas for improvement. But I think that their product does exactly what they say it will. They deliver what they say so there is not a lot that they can do to improve.

Document generation based on a structured format originating from different source applications, such as CRM, WMS, MES, and ERP systems.

End users receive the reports they dreamed of.

The integration with MS Office is an advantage, creating a better user experience.

In addition, the ability for users to have design and layout control is very important because it allows them control over the design and layout of their reports, without the help of IT.

They should add a document distribution solution on top of the document generation capability. It should allow us to send the generated document to a certain recipient (e.g. customer contact’s email address) based on a business-rules management system. That system would allow the end-user to manage a relationship between a document template and its recipient (email, fax, document repository, etc.).

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Very good.

Straightforward.

CapEx fits our requirements, OpEx is higher due to the 20% service and maintenance cost, where we normally pay 15%.

Several solutions.

So far, we have only created a few templates in a pilot project: two for our foundry department and one for our quality control department. Our data source is a REST service call. Output in PDF format.

Our output performance requirements, when making our decision regarding a solution, were more than met by the product offerings.

We did not consider building a custom solution. Our vision and strategy are based on the use of commercial, off-the-shelf, standard, packaged solutions. If those do not exist or do not fulfil our requirements, we build our own solutions. In this case, there were multiple alternatives available.

Regarding advice, the success of the product hinges on training the key users in using all functions of the product.

Our primary use case is for reporting.

MySQL is our source on the cloud.

We can develop any report at least five times faster.

We only have four templates right now. We are planning to create 40 more. Most of our reports are operational reports. 

Output performance is very important. We output PDF and Word formats. We will be using Excel format soon.

PDF and Word reports are so easy to create.

It is very important for users to have design and layout control. We create a lot of custom reports for our customers, so flexible and ease of use are critical.

AutoTag needs to be web-based, so our customers can create reports from our web.

Most of the issues are our fault because we did not understand the products.

Not yet.

The usually the response is within one hour. The technical support will WebEx with you. I rate them as a 10 out of 10.

We used a custom solution. A custom solution needs a lot of work.

It took us a week to get everything set up. It was because we were busy and could not focus on it. 

Windward technical support was helpful.

They are fair and flexible. They are willing to work with your current architecture to make sure you have the best deal.

We evaluated a lot of other options, but this is the best for our architecture and the easiest to integrate with our app.

The Windward solution was very fast to rollout, and it is proven. A custom solution costs a lot of money to build.

You will need a Windows machine to install AutoTag. AutoTag is the key. Once it is setup, your reports will be running without any issues.

Our organization generates large reports. These are documents of around 200 pages. Our organization accredits hospitals, and we send surveyors into hospitals who then survey according to certain standards, and they write up a very large report. It's those reports that go out to the member organizations, so our use case is very large reports, but not necessarily a large volume of them. 

It really hasn't improved our organization at all. We had a report-generator before, we have a report-generator now. It just means we're on a supported platform. Whereas before we were running services on something that we didn't actually have adequate support for, this new product does. 

When it came down to the crunch, all the products we evaluated generate reports and were pretty easy to use. The support from Windward was one of the primary considerations. Even though we're based in Australia we did get good support for them, even considering the difference in time zones, and cost was another significant factor as well, it was competitively priced.

I think it's a bit more intuitive to use on the AutoTag feature, so that's a positive, but from the end-user perspective it generates a report exactly as we want it, so in a timeframe that's the same as before. I don't know if that's a good, or a bad, is it middle of the road. It meets our expectations.

It's pretty early stages. We haven't got any constructive feedback yet.

It wasn't about stability. We had a couple of "teething" questions, and that was more about usability, how do we use the product. That was a learning on our side. Windward were really good in that, they did a screen-share with us, and actually worked with us to identify the problem and come up with solutions, so that was quite good. Again a very positive thing from Windward. 

We ran multiple reports concurrently, to the volume that we're likely to see, and had no issues. Again our workload is quite unique in that it's not volume-based. We only have 800 potential users. 

Exemplary. We have called a number of times, and normally it starts off with a "log-a-support-call" through their system. It gets acknowledged, we get an email acknowledgement of what's going on, they get in contact very quickly. They don't run a 24-hour service, but I think it's actually extended business hours, so they do cater for our requirements, being on the East coast of Australia. In the mornings we tee up with their afternoons, of the previous day.

Our previous report-generator product, it performed just as well. As I mentioned before, they're large reports but small in volume. It's not like we're processing one or two-page documents and doing hundreds of thousands of them. These are 200-page documents and they're ad-hoc; so a user would select it, run a report, and then a report would be generated. I think we're getting performance around around 45 seconds for a 200 page document, and most of that was the actual running of the query. 

I don't think we can actually build a report generator from scratch, so that's why we went with Windward. We were using Microsoft SSRS before, which was no longer supported by the vendor, and we also looked at another Australian-based product that does something similar, but we ended up going with Windward really for the level of support we got from them during our proof of concept, and also the printing as well.

It was quite straightforward, I don't think we actually had any issues. We did put it on the test system to begin with, and we didn't have any issues that I can recall.

I can't advise anybody about pricing and licensing, but it was competitive. We went and looked at the market and, for us, it met our requirements.

A lot of things we did look at were all volume-based, so it was a case of you buy a license to generate this many reports a year, and that's not something that I'm particularly interested in because it doesn't give you any idea - if we have future growth, or if we have a lean year - for budgeting reasons it's more difficult. With Windward it's a straight out license fee, whether we generate one page or we generate a million, it makes no difference.

Intelledox, that's an Australian-based company and does similar things - probably more expansive than Windward, has a lot more features - but features that we wouldn't need anyway. We're only looking for a report-generator, and it was on a per-page basis, so that was one of the reasons why we didn't chose that.

In our case, the ability for users to have design and layout control is not really important. The reports are pretty standard formats, these are agreed to well beforehand, so once they're designed we don't really go back and modify them that frequently.

We probably have half a dozen different templates and, as I mentioned before, they're very large, comprehensive documents. Most of it's textual, some embedded graphics and tables.

In terms of data sources, we just connect to our SQL server.

They were really helpful with the proof of concept. They offered free licenses. I think the initial license is a two-week one. They went out of their way to help us, and we requested two extensions, so we actually ran a bit of a longer evaluation, but in the end we certainly signed with them. They've been really helpful, from the account manager all the way through to the support people. 

The word of advice is: Try before you buy, give it a good run, see if it actually does meet all your needs. If something is not right, let them know, see if it's something that they know about, or if it's something that's on their future roadmap to address.