Windward Core Reviews

Allow law firms to create template documents based on data drawn from our application. Allow bank users to create reports based on their debt portfolio

The template documents are all legal documents created during the collection process of a foreclosure file. We have developed a couple of dozen templates so far.

The templates used to have to be filled out individually for each file. We currently have over 5000 files active in our system, so this saves the user a lot of time.

AutoTag, because it integrates with MS Word and makes it easy for our users to create template documents and reports.

We have multiple banks using our system, and they all have different formatting needs. AutoTag allows our users to design the templates based on differing needs of the banks. So the ability Windward provides for users to have design and layout control is important.

I do not have enough experience with it to give an accurate answer. It works great compared to what he had, and the support we have received has been fantastic.

One thing I haven't found a way around so far: Is there any way to avoid AutoTag loading in Word/Excel each time? I need to use it from time to time - quite rarely. AutoTag affects performance of Word/Excel. I do not want to install/uninstall AutoTag each time I need it.

No issues with stability.

Have not run into any issues.

Excellent, to this point.

Custom solution, as noted elsewhere in this review.

It was straightforward, nothing complex.

We looked at a couple of others, although I do not remember the names.

I have just started using the product within the last six months and would give it a rating of eight out of 10, currently.

We connect to a SQL database using JSON and output using Word, Excel, and PDF. Our output performance requirements, when making our solution decision, were integration with MS Office suite and the ability to create documents and reports. We did build a custom solution and it was very limited and restrictive.  We needed something with more options that integrated better with MS applications.

It is a good product, and I would not hesitate to recommend it.

Generic reporting.

As of now we don't have a lot of experience with this tool because we have only been using it for one month. So we haven't made much progress, as an organization, with it yet.

I think it is a very flexible tool, that is one reason it is valuable for us. But the graphics and pictures in the reports are the most important.

The ability for users to have design and layout control is also very important for us. This is why we chose Windward. 

Maybe just one thing: We would like to shrink these reports into one page, because there is a lot of free space on one page, but we cannot shrink it into the one page to be shorter. This is one thing we would like to change.

No issues with stability.

I think this is fine, but for now our external provider is doing prioritization for us so we don't have experience with this. But I think it is flexible enough. For now, we haven't had any problems with scalability.

We have not used tech support yet.

For now I have only had experience with Crystal Reports.

We were searching for something that is suitable and pleasant for our customers, user-friendly and so on. This was the most important requirement for us. We did not consider building a custom solution. We went with a package solution because our external vendor recommended it to us. They said that this is the only option, that they are working only with Windward and it is the only option for the IT system we are using.

It was not complex.

Right now we have four or five reports in our production environment. In our test environment we have an additional three or four. We are connected with an application from the Dorsum Wealth Management platform and we use the database from that system.

I have recommended Windward to two IT providers, but I haven't had any feedback for now. But I would recommend it. It provides very good-looking, flexible, and nice reports.

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. 

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.

Ability to harness all the power of standard Office software (Word & Excel) to produce rich reports while at the same time easily connecting to my data sources. Very visual way of finding and linking data. Simple integration with .net & Java.

We are able to move report generation from the developer workload and give to less technical staff.

Initial learning curve seems steep as first - but it does 'click' into place after viewing a few of the free Webinars that Windward offer.

The ability for it to create static reports, which mostly replicate Word and Excel.

A part of our business is to produce static report which we give to our clients. This product serves this purpose very well.

The generation of PDF/Excel reports needs to replicate Word/Excel more closely with less required workarounds.

We have been using this product for 2 years.

When we first started using it we did - however, that was partly due to issues at our end.

Sometimes automated reports don't generate - seems to be completely random.

Yes, unfortunately as Word/Excel are used to generate the reports, it suffers from the same issues as 32-bit Word/Excel.

Very good, it has always been prompt and helpful.

Good, support has actually spent the time to try and figure out why a problem is happening. And sometimes if it requires a fix then they have pushed out the fix in the next version.

No.

In-house.

• 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.

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.

• There's less of a a learning curve than with other reporting tools and it has easy to design complex templates using the AutoTag Microsoft Office plugin.
• I can use Microsoft Office standard features with templates. This has reduced template development time on coding, layouts and formatting.
• We receive customer data in various formats and it is very convenient to pass the XML datasource to generate reports.
• Easy to integrate with our company product using Javelin Server RESTful web-services API.

Reduced design time for complex templates.

• Javelin Server improvements: the ability to change the datasource file path on run-time.
• AutoTag improvements: does not support dynamically changing headers and footers on Microsoft Office Word templates.

I've used it for four years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

10 out of 10 - excellent.

10 out of 10 - excellent, promptly responded to all our queries communicating between the UK and the US.

No solution was used previously.

Setup was straightforward using Javelin Server (Setup using IIS7 & SQL DB) and AutoTag – Microsoft Office 2010.

We implemented it in-house and we received support when required.

Excellent investment for reducing template designing cost. Could not provide percentage numbers.

Day to day cost – None apart from development time for new template design.

We also evaluated Jaspersoft Report Designer.

• It's easy to use
• Use standard Microsoft Office to design complex templates so you can utilize rich Microsoft Office formatting, layouts etc.