Windward Core

Happy with Windward

Commentaires : NCC has been using Windward products as the reporting component of our land information system for over a decade now. It has always worked well for us, and we're planning to continue using it following a major system upgrade this coming year. Customer service and tech support has been great over the years, so we're pretty happy. Their developers have been responsive to requests from us regarding certain features, which is really nice.

Avantages :

Integration into Microsoft Word is great. Very easy connection to our corporate SQL Server databases, and report authoring is very intuitive. Our developers have no issues working with the engine component either.

Inconvénients :

We've had no real issues with the software suite since we acquired it.

Windward: A Cool Breeze and Breath of Fresh Air

Commentaires : When I was first tasked to find a new DocGen provider I muted my mic on Teams and cursed. Then I hit the internet and kept seeing a name pop up in the best of list round-ups, Windward. In the search for the perfect DocGen solution, I learned that simply searching for dynamic document generation turned up a lot of results that made it hard to find what we were looing for. I found that if I looked specifically for dynamic document elements, my search was greatly narrowed down and Windward allows for the most dynamic document elements of any other provider I looked into. Their test documents revealed that they were considering nearly every test case I was hoping to prove out. So, immediately they reduced my investigation time, by being so upfront. They can control for tables, images, text, colors, graphs, whole pages of a document and all of the elements within the document with variables in the data I pass. We had a use case scenario they said they had never heard before and sat with us to work through the problem and then came back with alternate solution that was perfect. Windward not only has exceeded any expectations, but they've absolutely impressed me with their service and their feature-rich product. As a company, we wanted a solution that could take us to the next level. Windward has helped us create proposals for our clients that look like they were crafted by hand specifically for that client. Windward makes our company look great.

Avantages :

Windward has more features than we ever could have expected. I'm truly amazed at their granular document control features, the pride they take in their product, and the level of service they provide. They worked with us through the two week trial as if we were paying customers. I found their price to be half that of their next closest competitor in features. And I love that we have unlimited document generation. I couldn't find that with any other competitor. The designer application as a Word plugin really speeds up the process of the template creation and allows me to get a template created by another team, like the marketing department, and then add the data within the same document.

Inconvénients :

Biggest con is that they are not cloud based for Windward Core. However, they understand this and worked with us to make sure that the setup was clean and easy, and honestly the server requirements are so low they could be run on a laptop (or a tablet, but let's not get crazy). However, the trade off is the price and the unlimited document count. Also, though we had security concerns, at first, it became obvious that we didn't need to be concerned because you don't pass them any data. So, what was a hard sell for my team, became a huge positive, to me.

Combine hundreds of MS Word reports, tens of thousands of lines of code, a report in seconds!

Commentaires : We're thrilled to have found this product! We recently finished a large PHP project and used Windward Reports (Autotag and Javelin Rest Services) as the reporting engine. Much of those reports employed some very large and complex scenarios. "Many" logical branches (If, Case, Loops). What the reporting package didn't have, we were able to create and add in the form of our own C# custom functions to fill the gap to handle everything from JSON Arrays to specialized functions to manage complex English linguistics. The ability to create a live report (WYSIWYG) right within Word, use styles and native MS Graphs lets Windward reports really shine through! You'll love it! While we built our reports upon one data source (MySQL), the package itself easily handles dozens of data types to import and work with. The speed at which we are seeing these reports generate is also worth noting. Extremely fast considering the number of iterations for the number of calculations. Autotag (the report designer add-in) also allows for variables to easily get passed into the reports and lets you create PODS to share variables and data you've used between users and designers. The real magic though is their fantastic support team backed by some A1 developers. What we didn't understand, Windward always explained to us and if something didn't work in the product, support made sure we had a work around or the product itself was able to perform at the required level. If you're looking for a reporting solution that backs onto Microsoft Office, can be built in as a service to run independently or from a user workstation (Autotag), I highly recommend you check out Windward Reports before investing time in other products! Of course, every rose has a few thorns and Autotag is without exception. We did find a few things!
1. Expect a learning curve. Debugging a report or figuring out why a report might not run can be challenging as your reports grow in complexity.
2. Graphs do not always appear as they should when output into PDF and other formats. However, Windward is addressing this now developing a new PDF engine to output with.
3. If you use a lot of complex formatting and styles, expect some challenges and minor nuances.

Enabling Technology making document generation easy

Avantages :

1. The ease and speed of the design of our document and report templates. Directly from our Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint), we have our analysts designing the templates. 2. Linking to numerous data sources and enabling of ODATA querying. 3. Wrappped as a webservice can be used by any 3rd party system in your organisation to become your universal document and report generation system. 4. Bring reporting capabilities to legacy and new systems.

Inconvénients :

Documentation could be updated for even more improved guidance in more complex templating and integration projects

The best Publishing tool

Commentaires : Great experience working with Winward. Very responsive team, They really care about your experience. Most of the time I am dealing with very complex situations and they never brushed me off. Great product, great support and I see that product is changing all the time to evolve to better and better version.

Avantages :

I like the ease of implementation to most applications on the market. It is very intuitive to use within well established Microsoft office Desktop applications like Word, Excel and Power Point. Most of the time Admin Users don't even need programming background to get started.

Inconvénients :

Like any other products bugs come up once in a while but Winward Customer Care team along with developers are doing superb job handling each situation with exemplary attitude.