Windward Core Reviews

Dynamic document generation via API is our primary use case.

The product has improved our organization in allowing us to dynamically generate our customer documents - all of our contracts, application documents, and any other documents that are always dynamically dependent on the customer's details. We're able to now generate them dynamically, using a single template and a single API core, by just passing that data through. That has allowed us to streamline our document generation capability within the organization, removing work that was potentially required to do that previously.

The ability to design templates within the Microsoft Office Suite has absolutely freed up developers' time for other tasks. Report-building is not having to be done by developers. A lot of it can be done by the simple business user, if it's just a font change or replacing some static text. That can be done by the simplest of office and business users. If you can use Word, you can do that.

Some of the more complex functions, like dynamic merging in a nested loop might require a little more advanced knowledge, but anyone who uses Excel or who can write a small macro in Word or Excel would be able to do that. The learning curve is a lot simpler than any of the other report builders that are out there.

One of the features that we have found most important is that the report builder is in Word, so it was very easy to get into it. The learning curve wasn't too steep. We could also use some of our existing Word templates. We could just leverage them, whereas competing products use a proprietary report builder where you have to rebuild everything from scratch.

The other major feature is having a RESTful API that we can call to create these documents.

One thing that frustrated us a little bit is that we have to use the Office PDF generation, because the native PDF generation is always slightly different compared to the one in Office. The formatting is just a little bit off here and there. Sometimes a page-break will not appear. There are always some little differences between the native PDF and the Office PDF. This means that we need to have Office installed on the server to be able to generate these documents via API. That's been a bit of a frustrating limitation for us. 

They do continue to improve that, but because we want to maintain documents exactly as we see them in Word, we have to use the Office PDF generation, instead of the native PDF generation. And that takes a little bit longer to generate as well, whereas if it was the native generation, it would take less than half-a-second. The Office PDF generation takes a bit longer, it can take up to two to three seconds to generate a single document. So there is a bit of a performance hit there.

This is the one negative aspect that we fought through. It didn't stop us from using the solution. But it is something that we hope, over time, will improve. If they could get the native PDF generation to be one-to-one with the Office generation, that would make it an exceptionally good product for us.

We've never had it crash. The stability of the solution is very good. We've had no issues with it ever crashing.

The scalability is pretty good. On our biggest days we now have to have three servers to handle the biggest loads - something like 10,000 documents per day. In general, it is not unusual to expect to have three servers supporting that sort of load. 

Overall, it probably generates some 10,000 documents for us, at least, per month, if not more. That's just off the top of my head. As our customer base grows, and if we decide to use it in different parts of the business, we would consider scaling up and using the product further.

At this stage, it is part of a crucial project that we delivered, and it's a crucial component of that project. As long as our business grows, we will consider growing that component of it, as well.

So the scalability is good. I won't say it's excellent, but it's certainly quite good, at least a six or a seven out of ten.

Tech support rates at least a good eight out of 10. They are always very keen to help. One time we had a bit of a critical situation and I got a response from the CEO himself, very promptly. It has always been very good.

The only issue for us is that, because we were Australian-based and they're American-based, there is a little bit of a delay in their response. They don't have 24/7 support. It could be better in that regard if they offered 24/7 support. But, the support, when it is provided, is very good. It's just not 24/7.

The previous solution was home-grown, an internally-coded solution that could not be leveraged. It was for template-building, it was a hard-coded document-generating engine. We didn't even have templates for it and it was very difficult to make any changes to the documents that were generated. The documents were not very pretty. They were very not marketing- or design-friendly.

In another part of the business, we used SSRS, which is a Microsoft report builder, for some documents. But that was not really good either. As soon as you had multiple pages it didn't work very well either. We went from a home-grown, 20-year-old legacy solution to using this product.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The solution is not very complex for what we use, meaning the RESTful service. All it required was one server to be set up with IIS and Microsoft Office installed on it.

We had a few little conflict issues that we had to check on with support, but those were specific to us. Overall, just following the instructions on their website, we were able to set up in a few hours or half a day.

Our implementation strategy was to first try it out. We did a bit of a proof of concept. We downloaded the REST API product and the demo of the report builder. We tested one of our templates with that, called it via an API call. Once we knew that that worked and it was delivering the results we were expecting, we went ahead and chose the product.

We also thought the cost was very reasonable, so we just went ahead and pulled the trigger on it. After that, we went into financial negotiations and bought the licenses to use the product in production. We then implemented the product on a more scalable server, one that was designed for production loads. We continued to test it and build reports afterward.

It was all done internally. We did reach out a few times directly to Windward with a few queries. They were specific configuration queries for our particular use case. We deployed it in the Azure Cloud. 

It's not a very complex product and the implementation was pretty straightforward.

It's difficult to measure whether it has saved costs or not because I have no baseline to compare it to. It is functionality we required that was previously accomplished by a 20-year-old capability that didn't fit our needs anymore. We needed to invest in this, to have this. 

I wouldn't say it has saved us costs because we didn't replace manual labor with this capability, we replaced our legacy capability.

The pricing is very reasonable for what it provides. The report builder is about one grand per user and we're only going to ever have two or three of those. And the licenses are perpetual. If those were subscription prices, if they were annual prices, that would be quite expensive. We are paying for a support contract, which is 20 percent of the price, but because the licenses are perpetual, I think the pricing is very reasonable.

We were comparing Windward to SSRS, Microsoft Sequel Server Report Services, which is one other kind of report-building product. I downloaded a few demos and tried them.

We looked at OpenText and we were thinking of OpenText as a grander solution. But at that point in time, we didn't have the capacity to go through a full procurement process, which is what would have been required for an OpenText solution. So we ended up doing a quick prototype and proof of concept with Windward.

The biggest issue I had was that all of those other solutions had a proprietary report builder, whereas we already had these documents in Word. All we had to do was use the templates we already had and just add the text fields, the form fields, and the merge fields into those documents. It was very quick for us to do the initial round of comparisons. All the other products we looked had their own report builder and we would have had to rebuild all the Word templates in a proprietary report builder.

For us, that was a key feature that we wanted to leverage.

Do a proof of concept to make sure that it meets your needs. Check the PDF generation between the Office PDF and the native PDF. That caught us out a little bit. Make sure, if you're hoping to use the native PDF, that it is generating the documents as you want them.

If your company is a massive enterprise business, Windward is probably not entirely suited for that, although we are a pretty big enterprise and we are able to leverage it. But very big enterprises can probably spend a bit more money and do bigger programs and have programmers to do this in a more powerful manner. But any small-medium or medium-sized businesses, the 100-employee businesses, it's perfectly suited for them. Those particular segments should try Windward out, do a proof of concept.

It's pretty straightforward. You can do a proof of concept easily in a week, to see if it meets your needs.

We've been using it now in production for over six months. We started proving concept with it about a year ago.

The solution's layout and design capabilities are good. But I think there are better ones on the market. What Windward has is completely sufficient for what we wanted to do and what we required. They're basically the same as what Word offers. Anything you can do in Microsoft Word, you can do in Windward. So you can do quite a lot, but there are definitely products out there with which can do more. However, they're also a lot more expensive, and a little more difficult to use.

The quality of the layouts and designs is very good. It's better than average, an eight out of ten. Again, there are better products out there which are a lot more expensive and a lot more focused on the desktop publishing market, more so than what people use Word for. It's a slightly different requirement, but it fit our requirements.

The ability to design templates within the Microsoft Office Suite is very good. It's a seven to eight out of 10. It's exactly what we were looking for in terms of capabilities. There are other ones on the market, which have more power but, again, those are focused on a slightly different market, and a slightly different requirement.

The POD (Portable Object Doclets) feature is good but you can actually do a lot without it. It is something that makes things a little bit easier. It isn't the greatest feature in the world, but it is useful. We managed to do a lot of work without using that particular feature.

The only people using the it are the report builders. They change the templates and create new ones. We have three people who are trained up to do report building. Sometimes, we let other people try and build them. It is pretty self-explanatory, and you can do some of those changes without any training. It really is pretty straightforward, but we have three people, particularly trained up to be report-builders.

The rest of the product is used by API calls, meaning it's used by applications. We've got a Loan Originations application. A lot of different users use that application, and when it gets to the point in the process where they require documents to be generated, they just click a button, and via API we are able to produce those documents for those types of users. I wouldn't say those users are using the product per se. They're using an API that sits in front of the product.

We have one staff member who is looking after the product, not even full-time. There are three or four people trained up to look after the infrastructure component of it, but it's pretty straightforward. For them, it overlaps with a lot of the other roles that they do in terms of looking after infrastructure, servers, etc.

Overall, I rated as I did because, for its price point, it's very good at delivering what it's designed to deliver: keeping your templates in Word. Anyone who can use Word can build these templates very quickly and easily. It also allows people who have a lot of these documents already in Word, to take those documents and very easily turn them into dynamic documents that can be generated on the fly via an API. That is exactly what we needed. For what we required, the product met those needs.

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.

It's a good product, it's efficient. We have integrated it in our wealth management product for the last eight years. All our PDF generation, client-advice, client invoices, and letter generation - any document that goes to a client - is generated through Windward in our wealth management solution. The integration works quite well.

Our product is a very complex wealth management product. It manages the whole lifecycle of a typical investor. In our product, we maintain four or five different types of UK tax wrappers. That's our feature. We have to communicate with all these investors. That means we have to send letters with updates and statements. If there is any trading then we have to send contract notes. There are also cancellation notices, welcome letters - tons of letters typically generated through a wealth management product.

The way the Windward product helps us is that it gives us flexibility, because we don't know, in advance, what kinds of letters and how many a client will need. Windward gives us extensible functionality where we train our clients: "Oh, you want to add a letter? Okay, here is the Windward template to start with, and you can extend it according to your requirements. Then you just drop the template and you're done. The product will pull out the data and create a letter for you through that existing in functionality."

That's a great feature which is dynamic in nature, where we don't have to lock it in with an existing screen, an existing function. We can change the data source dynamically, depending on our requirements and, using a template, fix up the data, create a report, and it does the job. Most of our clients use Windward to generate all the letters for their clients.

Having this dynamic feature is quite a good use case for our product, because we don't want to have something which is not dynamic in nature, something where we can't change features. Windward provides that functionality and that's why it's suitable for a product like our wealth management product.

It's user-friendly. As an IT and software product company, some of our guys know it, but we have trained our clients as well and they can create reports templates themselves, comfortably.

It integrates easily.

In addition, it's easy to create templates and reports using Microsoft Word, so we don't have to learn something new to create a template. That makes it very user-friendly. Anybody who uses a computer uses Microsoft Word, and they have integrated the product with Microsoft Word. People can easily start working on it without too much training. Some training is needed, but not a great amount. When we offload template creation responsibility to our clients, they learn it quickly. In a day's session, they start writing their templates.

It does require some basic abilities with "If-Else" statements and when you create a table you have to create some "While" loops to repeat different data items in the different lines in the table. Some technical knowledge is needed, at least in the context of our product, because we create a lot of complex tables and a lot of conditional statements, so when it comes to looping and logical constructs, some programming knowledge is needed. But a business analyst with minimum technical or programming knowledge can write the templates in our world. That's proof in itself that it's not that technical and it's user-friendly but some information about logical constructs, to make decisions within the template, is required.

If you leave that apart, everything else is like creating a table in Microsoft Word. So it's like creating a table, creating a graph and using the constructs which are available by default within Microsoft Word. On a scale of one to five, where five is very complex to create template, I would rate it at medium difficulty, like three out of five.

One of the things they added in the last two or three years is PODs, Portable Object Doclets. One of our clients said they wanted to use PODs. They're a good way to make some constructs modular and keep things in one place. We are using PODs and we find it very useful.

We don't use each and every feature, but what we usually use are repetition loops, table creation, dynamic graph creation based on data, importing of pictures, and multiple reports within one report using the "If-Else" construct, based on some conditions. They have hundreds of features and we are not using all of them. But we find what we use to be very easy to use, and very effective.

Finally, it's very feature-rich. You can create tables, you can create graphs, you can import pictures, and those features are also easy to use.

A few years back, we suggested they make it work for JSON because we were using XML format. They've already done that JSON formatting. From our perspective, it's meeting our requirements so we had not asked for any improvements in recent times.

I don't see any major change which could benefit us. One thing I could say, as is always the case, is that they could make the document creation performance faster. I'm not saying it's slow but it takes time to create the PDFs. If they could make it faster, that would be one area for improvement. It's not a negative at this point, but the world is moving to ultra-fast performance, so that area is something they can look at. I'd like to see improvement from microsecond to nanosecond performance because that's the kind of demand in the market, to be faster and faster.

I don't have metrics, but I can say that some of our largest clients have on the order of 1,000,000 accounts and they are generating hundreds and hundreds of letters every day using Windward. I have never seen any problems on the performance side. It's not crashing or not performing on high volume. I can't recall any scenario where a client complained that Windward was crashing.

From time to time, we get an issue here and there, but nothing major in nature. The product is quite stable and robust.

In our largest installation, our back-office users number about 250. They are using Windward indirectly because they are generating letters and, internally, they are being generated through Windward.

When it comes to concurrency, on a server with eight threads, eight concurrent connections are being used. On the design side - the people who are designing reports - at the client I was referring to, there are four people who have been trained to design documents for the product.

We have deployed on a maximum four-node cluster. We are using a Java server engine and we have deployed in multiple low-clusters. Four is the maximum at the moment that our clients are using, and it scales quite well.

There are some limitations to what the product can do on the deployed infrastructure, but it's not just the product, it's the infrastructure limitation as well. I haven't observed any scalability problems. We are using it on AWS and we can just scale up as per our requirements. I can't recall any problem caused by Windward.

Our relationship with Windward is really good. They fix problems very quickly if we break something.

Two years back we ran into a problem, not in the product but they had provided a different type of license to one of our clients, with which we have not tested our product. We raised an issue about the problem. The support team was quite aggressive and tried to help us as soon as possible. There was commitment to help us as their clients. They were meeting all the SLAs. We haven't created thousands of issues for them, but this is one I can recall and they were quite proactive in helping us on that.

If you compare manual letter generation and automatic letter generation, with the number of letters generated by a typical client, if they were to do it manually they would need at least ten FTEs to do the work.

When it comes to the cost of integrating an automated solution, as I said, integration is quite straightforward, so we didn't have to spend too much time on this.

There's good return on investment, looking at the cost of product and the value it adds to the process. The cost of the product can be recovered easily within one year and not much more than that.

Pricing is something I complain about. Production pricing is okay, but for a testing environment the pricing looks a bit high to me. I have discussed this with them a couple of times, that for testing and development environments it shouldn't be priced that high. That's an area of improvement I would suggest.

From time to time, some of our clients will ask why we are using Windward, why not the product they are using. We have done comparisons and it's comparable to any other product in the market. It does everything that the client's product does and it's already integrated, so why re-invent the wheel and integrate their product with our product?

Existing products in the market are quite comparable in features and performance.

I don't have too much experience with other products. Some of our clients have done a comparative analysis but I don't see why I wouldn't recommend this product. It has most of the features, it is easy to integrate, it does the job, and its performance is good. Those are the things I look for. Design is easy and does not have a steep learning curve. Based on these features I would recommend it.

We use the Java API to integrate with our product. Once we integrated, we made it dynamic, as I was saying earlier, so clients can add more and more reports, more and more letters to the implementation. We have integration through API and use the API to make it dynamic, particularly from a data-source point of view, so we can chain the data set at run-time in the deployed environment. That gives us a lot of flexibility.

Different people use it in different ways, but this is the way we use it: Run-time and design time.

Some of our guys join their training, but our techies, our IT team does all the integration. We get minimal help. We just get their release and get it working in our environment.

For deployment and maintenance, we have a team of two to three people in managed services who manage the whole installation; not just Windward but the whole product. The Windward part has hardly any share of their time in terms of deployment.

This is the only product we use at the moment for document or letter generation so it has reached its maximum. There are no plans to extend it further. If, in the future, we have additional requirements, it could be extended. We have the two modes in which we are using it. One is online in our digital platform which uses this product for all the document generation. The other is the back-office side, where bulk letter-generation also uses Windward. I don't see any additional use cases coming; we are using it in all possible scenarios.

Overall, we don't have any problems with Windward, and that's why we've had it for eight years; otherwise, we would have changed it. It's a good product, it's being enhanced over time, they are not stagnant. They keep changing, adding new and useful features - useful to us and to our clients.

I would give Windward a nine out of ten looking at the support and the ease of use of the product.

The use case is that we are building a backend application for the tax office here in Curaçao. The tax administration sends out documents to people who need to pay taxes. All the communication, all the letters, are designed using Windward products and are also generated by Windward engines.

We are not using it as a report-generation tool. We are using it more as a letter/document generation tool. With the functionality of Windward, we can adjust the documents dynamically to the individual needs of every taxpayer. The "if this then that" functionality in Windward allows us to design the documents dynamically so that there is only information on the document that is relevant to the taxpayer.

Before using Windward, we were using another document creation tool and this old tool required some very specific, technical, XSLT knowledge, which was scarce. We didn't have a lot of people with this knowledge and it's also scarce in the market. By changing to Windward, the whole technical challenge of creating a document has been eliminated.

Our business users who are like business consultants in our company are now able to design documents together with our customers. Before, the business consultants were only able to draw up specifications which had to be sent to the technical guys who would actually create them. We eliminated one step in the whole process of development.

In addition, in the future, we are aiming for a situation where our customers will be able to maintain their reports or their documents by themselves. Because it is a Microsoft Office plugin, and our customers are familiar with Microsoft Office, we expect that in the future they will be able to maintain their reports by themselves. That would be more efficient for everybody and eliminate yet another step in development.

As for the ability to design templates within the Microsoft Office Suite, it works fine. We primarily use Microsoft Word, but lately we have also been generating reports with Microsoft Excel. Excel requires a little bit more technical knowledge, especially about Excel, of course, to be able to create good documents. But the document creation process has been simplified a lot and we can now allow colleagues with more of a business background and knowledge of Microsoft Office to create documents that work. The technical XSLT guys are not required in this part of the process anymore, so they are now spending their time on other technical issues.

These technical guys were really scarce in our company, so if we had had to the pull off the project that we did here in Curaçao, that went live with Windward, we would have had to hire more technical guys or train more technical guys to get all the reports, all the documents designed, doing it the old way. That wasn't necessary.

The most valuable feature is that it provides good, dynamic document-generation performance and the documents are being generated reliably. These are very important features to us. 

In the report-designing area, we are using quite a bit of functionality to adapt all the documents. We're using Import Tags and Out Tags, we're using For-Each loops, we're using headers, footers, custom font types, watermarks & barcodes. We're using a whole bunch of functionality and it all works reliably.

For the designer we use AutoTag which is a Microsoft Word plugin. In general, it's easy to use, it doesn't have a very steep learning curve. It's not difficult, for people who know Microsoft Office well, to start using the AutoTag tool. The plugin has an easy look and feel. It feels just like you're in a Microsoft Office environment with some extra functionality. It's well done. The quality is good, there are no layout glitches, no design glitches in the front end of AutoTag designer.

Regarding AutoTag, we do notice that when you want to refactor a little bit of your template design or when you want to implement changes, sometimes you need a lot of clicks to get the change done. For instance, if only one identifier's name is changed and you need to change that identifier throughout your documents, it would be helpful to be able to do a find-and-replace, find all the identifiers with the old name and replace them with the new name. We haven't found a way to do that with a find-replace tool. Throughout the Windward user interface, you need a lot of clicks to get that done. That can be a somewhat tedious task. If you want to do somewhat more technical tasks, the front end can be a little bit slow or inefficient because you need to perform a lot of clicks to get the technical change done.

Also, there's always a little bit of a struggle for our customers to get the licensing done. That is because we develop on a platform that would prefer a Java Engine. The platform will communicate better with a Java Engine. The platform also does install with many instances, and the problem is that for every instance you have to pay for a license which will then increase the cost enormously.

Instead of using the integrated Java Engine we are now using th RESTful engine, which is kind of like a standalone Windward instance that we can call as a service. It generates documents for any of the instances that we want. So instead of having ten Java instances, we only need one RESTful instance for the same functionality, and for one-tenth of the cost. So even though the preferred technical implementation is Java, we are using RESTful, simply because the licensing costs are a lot less. I find it a bit of a shame that the business model doesn't allow us to use the preferred technical implementation.

It's very stable. We haven't had any issues.

We have only done one update of the Windward product, after we asked for some error-handling functionality, and Windward built that for us. They released a new update that included error-handling and we updated our product at that time. That caused some issues. Upgrades are usually when some templates will start working a little bit differently and we might need to change little things here and there, but there wasn't anything big. As long as we don't upgrade the product again, I don't expect any stability issues.

With the RESTful engine, we are able to very easily scale, because the RESTful engine is set-up as a standalone service: we just call it with a Rest-message and it returns a document. We can send requests to that service from any application that we want and generate documents.

The Java Engine, on the other hand, needs to be installed on every instance of the product that we are building. Even though that integration would be preferable from a technical point of view because it would eliminate a lot of requests to another server, requests that create overhead, the business model simply is not scalable. We cannot pay for every instance that we install.

Whenever I have an issue, I submit it to technical support and they always answer within the same day, mostly within a couple of hours. Usually, the problem is solved that same day. Within Windward support there are two lines of support. There's the lighter helpdesk and if they cannot fix the problem you get through to the more technical guys. All the problems that we've encountered so far have usually been fixed within two or three days. It's been a pretty good experience.

We are using the BeInformed platform which is a low-code platform, a process-modeling platform to build applications. This suite had document generation tool integrated. It's not a very well-known tool but it was an FOP and XSLT-based technology they used to generate PDF documents.

We switched because our document generation process was tedious generating a lot of errors. Our business consultants would draw up specifications and send them to the technical guys who would then use the FOP and XSLT technology to design those documents. Of course, the technical guys don't always understand the business so the documents would come out differently than expected. There were a lot of issues, and by eliminating that whole step, the whole document generation process is a lot more efficient. It's a lot easier to design the right documents with a customer looking over our shoulders while we're designing the documents in Microsoft Word.

We did a proof of concept when I started a few years ago. It was not straightforward for me but I also had almost no experience with this whole integration of platforms and tools. It was the first time that I was integrating a new tool into an IT system that already existed. I was surprised that I got good results within one month, when going back and forth with Windward support. I was surprised that it worked out so quickly and so nicely. If I were to do it again today and I things might be more obvious, but I was surprised that everything was working pretty quickly.

Things that came across as complex included connecting with a database or installing the right forms on the server. They were technical things that you forget or you don't know how they work or haven't seen them before.

The setup is a continuous process. Until today, we are reconfiguring things, adding new functionalities. It never really finishes. We got the first version up and running after one month for the proof of concept and another month for implementing it into the actual product.

Our implementation strategy was "just do it." 

The easy part of this project was that it was a new project, so there were no documents being generated yet in an old-fashioned way. We do have customers running with our old technology, which we did not migrate. So it was kind of easy for this project to just implement Windward because there was nothing else anyway. Instead of going down a known route, we took an unknown route which turned out to work pretty well.

We did everything in-house, mostly by myself, with the support of Windward and my colleagues. 

We had one template designer who focused on the AutoTag part. We had our general deployment guys, our deployment department, that configured all the servers and the engines - not only internally but also for our customers. We definitely needed their experience as well. There were three people working on it most of the time but not full-time.

It would be difficult to measure whether Windward has reduced cost in our organization. It would be very difficult to measure because we don't have a "before and after" situation. The only thing that I do know is that the whole process of document design has been a whole lot smoother with fewer errors, which, of course, means less cost to fix them. But as the whole thing just happened under the umbrella of an even bigger project in which we didn't use an alternative document generation technology, it's very difficult to measure the before and after situation.

From my experience in this field, the product is reasonably priced, at least with the RESTful engine implementation. It's definitely not a cheap option. People say, "That's a fair amount of money to pay for a document generation tool." At the same time, you do get good functionality and the support is good. You do get something back for your money. So that's good.

We work in the Caribbean with small island developing states (SIDS). We do notice for some small island communities the license costs are a real bottleneck. So we cannot implement this solution in their environments because the license costs are too steep. It's a matter of a scaling disadvantage in this region because some islands just have 20,000 or 30,000 inhabitants and they need a whole independent IT system for tax administration. That's a big investment for such a small community. Sometimes, just because of cost savings, we cannot implement the preferred solution. That's part of being here in the Caribbean.

You need some kind of scale to be able to afford something like $16,000 to $17,000, for a document generation solution, and we are not always able to reach that scale with our customers here. That simply eliminates Windward as an option. It limits the business of Windward in this region.

Before we started the proof of concept on Windward two-and-a-half years ago, we did market research on document generation tools. I did download and try out Crystal Reports. The look and feel of Crystal Reports is something like Windows XP, or it was at that point. The look and feel of the AutoTag plugin and the designer of the Microsoft 2017 plugin was a lot better. 

We also went with Windward vs Crystal Reports because we had in mind that our customers, at some point, would be able to maintain their own reports. Our customers are mostly proficient in Microsoft Office and not in another tool. So we found that to be a big plus.

I was contacted by a Dutch guy recently who was considering using Windward for one of his projects. So I told him more or less what I said above: that we have had a good experience, that it's a solid tool and stable tool, which is not too difficult to use for a Microsoft Office user. Also, the support is pretty good. We use other third-party software as well but in my opinion, the Windward support has been the best support I have experienced so far.

We don't use PODs (Portable Object Doclets) because we prefer to use Import Tags and sub-templates. Once you insert the PODs into a template, they're physically there in the template and they will not update as you update the POD. However, with the Import Tag, when you update the sub-templates, the change will automatically be committed to all the main templates that call the sub-templates. It's easier, for maintenance of your template repository, to use the Import Tags with the sub-templates rather than the PODs, where they physically insert the code or a piece of functionality into your template. We're not using Windward as a reporting tool to report, like people who have management reports based on database information. Rather, we're using Windward as a document creation tool which generates thousands of almost identical documents, that are specific for each taxpayer.

Staff requirements for day-to-day maintenance depends. Once a document is finished, our customers have agreed on the template, there's not much maintenance left to do. It's only when the customer requires changes or sees bugs that we need to do changes. We don't spend a lot of time with maintenance at this point.

We have two projects that are using Windward at the moment. With these two projects, there are about ten people who touch the Windward solution. They include the AutoTag designer and the more technical RESTful engine and deployment area.

For me so far the Windward document generation software is the preferred solution for creating documents. That means that we will always advise our customers who need documents created or who need to update their document generation process, to use Windward. We will implement Windward with them. We have one big project going on now that has Windward implemented, and one smaller project. Our company runs three or four big projects at the moment, and about ten or 15 smaller ones. There's still a lot of room for change and there's a lot of room for Windward implementation.

We've recently started to use Windward not only for document generation but also for actually creating management reports. I believe that that is how most Windward customers use the tool, to generate management reports based on data in a data warehouse in an SQL database or any database. Whereas our initial use case was document generation, which has a slightly different philosophy, because in the document generation you don't want to necessarily always display the most recent data, you want to display data from the moment that the document was initially created. We have more static data saved in XML files. Our data source is not a SQL server, but rather they are XML files.

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.

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.

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.

The primary use for the solution is that we create legal agreements for our clients by using data within our database.

They're usually legal agreements, they could be negotiation documents, all about what's called right-of-way, which is asking people for use of their property for electrical lines and gas lines, etc. That's what it's used for across all of our client base. In terms of the number of templates we have, it has to be in the thousands, because of the number of clients that we support with the solution.

It's hard for me to say because we've had this product ever since we started our solution. We really could not have started our business, quite honestly, without a document generation engine like Windward. We couldn't have done it without it.

The ability for it to be integrated into our software solution and the AutoTag tool that allows us to quite quickly create and update the templates themselves.

Also, the ability for users to have design and layout control is very important because, as we all know, things change and regulations change, so they need to be able to modify things as the business changes.

We've been working with Windward and the executives over there over a number of years and they've been quite flexible and helpful with all of our challenges.

If I were to think of one thing - and this is really an opportunity, not something that's a deficiency - a lot of clients that want to use this don't have the technical background for the SQL portion of gathering the data. If Windward were to make a more user-friendly SQL extract front-end, that would help a lot of clients to leverage the application a lot more.

Yes, we have encountered stability issues, but I think they were more when we were changing from one licensed product to another, and how we configured our system. We had some issues with the licensing, but that was resolved by Windward a long time ago.

I have not seen any scalability issues, I have not seen a performance issues. Usually when we do, it has to do with the SQL portion of it.

They are good. They give us the information we need to help troubleshoot where we are at.

I don't believe we had another solution at the beginning. We started, and have stayed, with Windward.

The setup was straightforward.

It is absolutely worth the value. 

They have flexibility, depending on what you're looking for from a buying standpoint. The current pricing models are quite flexible, with the ability to use it on an as-needed basis, or to get a perpetual license that covers a customer that might have extensive needs. I think it's pretty good.

We solely connect to our own solution database, our geoAMPS right-of-way database. We create PDF, Word, and Excel for the most part.

We did not consider building a custom solution because we wanted to be able to concentrate on our core business, which is supporting our customers. And we wanted to concentrate on their businesses, not on the document generation itself, so we looked for a third-party solution that concentrates on document creation.

In terms of advice to others who are considering this type of solution, first, really confirm what your volume is going to be, and pick the solution that best meets your volume needs. If you're close to the higher volume level, that's what you should pick because that will reduce any kind of interruptions.