Dundas Dashboard Reviews

We use Dundas for dashboarding and reporting on IoT KPIs.

I was a little disappointed in Dundas. I found other tools like Tableau and Power BI to be more powerful. I intended to use Dundus as an organizational BI tool, but I think there's a significant learning curve with Dundas versus the others. 

The user experience and UI could also improve. It should be simpler for end users who don't have much technical knowledge. I have an IT background, but I think it might be challenging for anyone who is unfamiliar with databases. 

I have used Dundas Dashboard for less than a year.

I haven't contacted support, but my colleagues said they were satisfied with the response. 

I did not set Dundas up. My colleagues said it was relatively straightforward but took a little more time than some other tools. 

The pricing is based on the number of users, so the licensing model is comparable to other tools. I can't say whether the price itself is competitive. 

I rate Dundas Dashboard seven out of 10. 

Dundas Dashboard offers a very intuitive dashboard design interface with a lot of drag-and-drop data visualization controls (various charts, data grids, etc.). This, combined with the powerful embedded scripting language (DundasScript), makes it a great tool for data visualization.

Our old reporting infrastructure consisted of over 300 tabular reports. Think: “Performance by Date”, “Performance by Team”, “and Performance by Location.”Combining SSAS and Dundas Dashboard has enabled us to consolidate this infrastructure into few very dashboards that offer the flexibility to analyze data by various dimensions quickly and easily.

We’ve experienced an unusually large number of bugs in the product since implementation. Generally minor scripting-related bugs that resulted in unexpected behavior. Dundas has maintained a very quick release cycle and is fast to address these issues as we report them.

We deployed our first dashboard using Dundas Dashboard in December 2013. We have been using it for enterprise dashboard functionality since that time.

No issues worth noting.

Overall, the product is quite stable. We’re providing enterprise dashboard functionality to several thousand users on a daily basis with no issues.

There are no issues, and we currently serve several thousand users using a VM host that is allocated 8GB of RAM and four CPU cores. The product scales extremely well, especially when paired with SSAS.

Dundas support is extremely responsive - 9/10.

Their support staff is really responsive and typically provides responses within a matter of hours during normal business hours. There is no after-hours support available as far as I know - 9/10.

Our last solution was a “home grown” .NET reporting solution. It didn’t scale well and was extremely high maintenance.

Very simple. The installation process took perhaps 30 minutes after the VM was online. At that point you’re ready to start developing dashboards.

It was done in-house.

Based on our usage and licensing cost, it is only costing us approximately $0.50 per hour of dashboard usage to provide dashboards to several thousand users. While not really an ROI figure, that’s hard to beat.

Tableau and several other products were evaluated. We have also evaluated the latest offering from Dundas Data Visualization called Dundas BI for future use.

Consider skipping Dundas Dashboard and look into Dundas BI. Dundas Dashboard is Silverlight based which is quickly becoming an obsolete technology. Dundas BI offers similar functionality—and more—but is HTM5 based.

The ability to drag and drop dimensions into place and the ease of use that the reporting provides.

I work with "not the smartest" analysts and this tool provides them the ability to dive for their answers.

For what the tool offers and its relatively cheap price tag, not too much.

I've used it for almost two years.

Dundas is constantly not picking up cube changes when deployed. I must refresh IIS on the server before changes are picked up. It doesn't happen all the time for data but should any column/row headers change, it happens then.

It's a pretty stable product.

Pretty good, although some of their upper account execs tend to not be as helpful.

Excellent, the few times I have to use the support, they resolved the issue(s) within 24 hrs.

It was implemented in-house.

It's pretty good.

Make sure to detail your steps and thoroughly design your templates.

It has easy access to the data cube.

• Documentation for developers
• Dashboard scripting

I used it from 3/11/2014 to 12/1/2014.

Updating the application to newer versions consistently failed and had to be repeated multiple times per server.

Random and obscure errors with poor exception details.

Deployment of new dashboards to a multi-server environment could be a hassle.

8/10.

6/10. It's geared more towards users rather than developers.

We have since moved on from Dundas, and instead developed an internal solution.

It was mostly straightforward.

We implemented it in-house.

None.

It's not a development platform. It is meant for end users. Developers only required for custom user-store implementation, custom setup, etc. If quick dashboards are required without heavy features or customization, and there is no dedicated BI/Analytics developer, then Dundas Dashbaords works fine.

The ease in setting up the Dundas Dashboard was nice. I also liked being able to manipulate things using Dundas script.

We were still in testing and had not officially rolled this out to the executive team before I left.

I used it for for seven months, out of 10, while I was employed at Gibson.

No issues encountered. Deployment was very simple and pulling in our SQL queries and stored procedures was a snap.

No issues encountered.

We were using home-grown solutions (.net solutions).

It was very straightforward as understanding how it was tiered for setup was simple.

We implemented it in-house.

• The ability to show any data in graphical form
• Sending notifications in case some data reaches the threshold

We have used it to represent the state of various job queues and system statuses, and having these values in graphical form gives us an instant idea if everything is working fine or not. If not, we need to look at any scheduled jobs/machine, lessening our downtime, which is very important for an airline business.

Installing - if someone has installed it using their work email as an ID, and they have moved on, and a new person is hired who needs to upgrade the currently running version, they can't do it. They need to install new version an then do a URL redirect so every user is routed to the newer version automatically, and I feel that this process can be simplified.

I've used it for over two years.

No issues encountered.

It's excellent, as I have gotten prompt responses whenever I have contacted customer service. That is very encouraging to experiment with the product and is a big advantage, 10/10.

Excellent - 10/10.

We implemented it in-house.

This has saved us a lot of money in the past, as instant status/notification prompts quick reaction from responsible team, and the issue is fixed within the SLA period, saving the company from various penalties.

I'm not aware of the actual licensing cost, but it required us to have a VM with a SQL DB installed to host this product.

It is a little tricky to install the tool initially, but once it's mastered, you can use it with any data, and you can configure the Dundas webpart to show reports in SharePoint as well.

• Dundas script is great, and gives users the freedom to create an almost endless range of custom interactions
• I love the flexible design options that allow a creative approach to dashboard design
• It's very easy to host your dashboards as a webpage in HTML or Silverlight formats

Before using Dundas we were providing reports of a very similar theme to multiple markets on an adhoc basis. By centralising these into a collection of dashboards we were able to free up a significant amount of resource and allocate it to more valuable tasks.

A wider variety of data visualisations and built in interactions would improve this product.

I've used it for two years.

I wasn't involved in the deployment.

On occasion, the programme would crash and provided very little in the way of an error report, which was extremely frustrating especially when work was lost as a result.

No. We were serving data to almost 30 markets with no issues.

Excellent. Dundas were always quick to respond to emails, and clear with their instruction/assistance.

Excellent - same as above.

No issues encountered.

It was all done in-house.

No. Although this year we will be assessing Tableau and Qlikview as alternatives

Dundas is great for creating attractive dashboard that look as though they have been custom designed rather than put together using a BI tool. The built in script editor adds a level flexibility that you don't see in some other tools on the market, although the down side of this is that it can take a while to get to grips with if you don't have any development experience. For me, a wider range of data visualisation options would have resulted in a higher score.

Make sure you have technical help on hand when you first start developing dashboards with Dundas. Creating even a simple dashboard interaction requires scripting, which can be confusing at first if you do not have a background in programming/web development.

The ease in connecting to any data source (Excel, MS SQL, Oracle, etc.) and being able to create a dashboard or a chart. You can then allow others to access it over the internet from their computer or hand-held device. Also, the scripting feature allows you to use C# to do almost anything you can imagine with a report, which makes it very customizable. It also helps that they use a programming language that is widely used so you can find answers and help on the internet. The documentation and how to videos are also very helpful.

Previously, we had five people doing separate reports in Excel. Each report looked different, and every month we would have to recreate them with a different set of data. With Dundas, we can now enforce a standard using themes so that all the reports have the same look and feel no matter who creates it. Also, it now automates our monthly reports so all we need to do is update the data in a database, and the report updates real-time. From an automation standpoint this has significantly increased our productivity and ability to get nice looking reports out with short turn around.

The only improvement we have noticed would be if they could do away with using Silverlight. This forces the users who view the reports the first time to install Silverlight and recently Google Chrome has stopped supporting Silverlight so we can't use that browser to view reports.

I've been using it for three years.

I had no problems installing it.

The older versions had problems with memory leaks but those all seem to be resolved in v5.0.

No issues encountered.

10/10 as they always answer the phone and respond quickly to emails.

10/10 as they are also very helpful and quick at responding.

We used several different solutions (Chart Runner, Excel, Crystal, Xcelsius) but the problem was all the reports looked different, and only certain people could use each solution. This was a unifying solution that we all learned to use and the learning curve was very small. Also, we needed a way to deliver the charts and reports we created via a website which none of our older solutions allowed us to do this we would email the report or chart to everyone who needed it.

Deployment and upgrades are a breeze as the installation instructions were easy to follow.

In-house IT setup the server ,and I installed it in about an hour.

We were not looking for an ROI monetary figure, but were looking for a tool that would help us collaborate data and share it in a more transparent way. With that in mind, it was a success and we feel a return on our investment.

Setup cost was the cost of the server license and the cost of setting up a virtual server, and I don't know the monetary figure. The day-to-day cost is just the yearly maintenance fee since we own the server and the license.

• ActiveStrategy
• Pentaho
• iDashboards
• LogiXML
• Spider Strategies
• QlikView
• Roambi
• Xcelsius.

Do the initial training (over Webex) and it will give you a good jump-start. Take the time to learn how to use the documentation there is a lot of good stuff in there. This is a great product!

• Customizable UI
• Out of the box grid control has very good features like interactive sorting, dynamic grouping, etc.
• Option of writing custom code on almost all controls
• Charting controls are very good

Overall executive dashboards carry a lot more information and they look more beautiful.

Cascading parameters should be handled more efficiently.

3 years

Not anything in particular.

In times of heavy load, the dashboards take a long time to load. Also, there were instances when changes made in one environment were not reflected in another, unless, and until ,we check it (note: we use a shared DB between environments).

Not tried to scale up on a very large scale, but in general there were no issues.

We have a paid support license, and the service is good.

We have a paid support license, and the service is good.

We used SSRS earlier, and the reason we switched was because this product had more features. This is in terms of better a UI and it supported the implementation of more complex dashboards.

It's pretty straightforward, and the only complexity involved was in integrating it with our existing enterprise single sign on feature.

We were the vendors for JLL and we implemented the solution along with JLL counterparts. When we started, we were novices with little knowledge on it, but the team had good knowledge in other reporting tools like SSRS.

It is a good tool with some very good out of the box features and good support for OLAP model and can be considered as implementing good dashboards. Finding the resources was a little challenging, and per my personal experience, it took longer to generate a typical report as compared to SSRS (although this could be because I was more comfortable with that tool), but the output was much more beautiful.

Another issue noticed was that the Silverlight and HTML versions, in most practical cases, had to be developed separately because there were some UI issues, and it did not work as smoothly as suggested in the demo. That showed that we just switched the viewer and using the same code gives both Silverlight and HTML output without any effort. This experience is now at least year or so old, and now it might be with more recent releases the product has improved.