Windward Core Reviews

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.

• 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.

• 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.

Previously we were running reports from SQL Queries and formatting the outputs in Powerpoint Presentations, Word Documents or Excel Spreadsheets. Due to large growth, our reporting needs both externally and internally were taking too much time from the Management Information team to run on a daily basis.

Since the installation of Autotag, users are now able to run reports either for their business area or for their external clients with the MI team assisting on creating the templates. This has delivered huge time savings across the business allowing more time to focus on development and growth opportunities.

The template designer is by far the best feature within Windward Autotag. You build the reports in the Microsoft Applications that you already know, and simply add tags which draw the data in where you need it. The learning curve is very low due to this and also serves as a great way to introduce our junior members to SQL queries.

As Autotag constantly upgrades it does more post processing on the documents. It is still lightning fast for most reporting needs, however for some of the more complex reporting we have noticed a small slow down over previous versions.

Customer Service:

The customer service at Windward is absolutely top notch. Every time I've had a query they have always responded promptly and in a friendly yet professional manner.

Technical Support:

The technical support team is one of the best technical support teams I have ever dealt with. I can keep track of the status of my technical query at any time by logging into their site. They respond very promptly and they really work hard to break through any technical issue.

I like Windward as it's directly attached to MS Word and we actually develop the report on MS Word. It gives us the benefit of using most of the MS Word features. Lot of clients of ours prefer reports in MS Word format and therefore Windward suits us quite well. Also, it's much better compared to a couple of years ago.

Previously we were using SSRS reporting engine to render reports to MS Word. It couldn't deliver what our clients wanted. So we had to go for an alternative. Now clients are quite happy as they get pretty much what they wanted. It may not be 100% but quite close.

I think it needs few other reporting features like grouping data on the report itself.

About three years.

Yes there were some unexpected bugs but we were able to find workarounds.

Yes there were some unexpected bugs but we were able to find workarounds.

No, not really.

It's quite good actually. Usually I get a response within 24 hours.

It's quite good actually. Usually I get a response within 24 hours.

Previously we were using SSRS reporting engine to render reports to MS Word. It couldn't deliver what our clients wanted. So we had to go for an alternative. Now clients are quite happy as they get pretty much what they wanted. It may not be 100% but quite close.

I'd say average. Not easy nor really complex.

In house implementation was done.

When I started a couple of years ago Windward wasn't a very stable product. So the maintenance cost was bit high. But now it's much better.

I was not involved in the process. But I was told that Windward was the only one they could find as a better product in terms of delivering what our clients wanted at that time.

It's a really good product if you really want the reports in MS Word form and if you want to use MS Word features in your reports.

Windward AutoTag is an add-in for Microsoft Word and other products. We use AutoTag to pull in data from our software to create standard documents for all clients, and customized ones as needed.

This solution allows our clients to create their own custom documents on the fly. It allows clients to tweak our standard document templates to meet their needs. We didn't have this feature in the past.

It is very user-friendly, and the wizard and equation options. There is a feature to create "PODs" for data points that you will be using over and over again. You create a POD and save it to your network drive. Then all you have to do is pull it into your next document template when needed. This saves so much time when templates need to be created quickly.

I would like to see examples included within the Wiki information to show how each function option could be used.

Yes. We switched as it was no longer supported. It didn't meet our needs or our clients'.

It's a quick setup, and the license is on an individual basis. I'm not part of the cost or pricing conversations with our clients.

I was not part of the group of people that evaluated other options.

The ability to design reports, using all the formatting bells and whistles, in Microsoft Word and Excel. Plus the ability to combine XML data and SQL data.

The most important is how we have been able to produce much more persuasive and professional reports than our peers.

Pricing is based off server cores. This has caused us to have to engineer our production server environment around the product.

6 or 7 years.

None. It is really easy to implement.

The product is very stable, and we have yet to find a scenario where the design environment (AutoTag) was different than our production environment (.NET Engine).

No issues with scalability.

As good as the product is, the customer service is even better. Out of all of the products we use in our company, Windward is hands down the best support without even a close second.

Awesome.

We originally used Crystal Reports, and then tried WSDL. We switched because of the versatility in report design available using Word/Excel.

Very straightforward. AutoTag takes some getting used to, but if you have used a report writer or a macro structure before it comes pretty easily. The production use is even easier. Literally just a few lines of code to delploy.

In-house.

We never evaluated, but it has never been a question.

Try it and you’ll buy it. We have introduced several of our friends to this product and they have all been impressed.