Astera ReportMiner vs. Endeca (discontinued) vs. OpenText Magellan

Astera ReportMiner is well suited for those who work with EMR Data or business operations data where different platforms may report on similar data but not everything is the same between the different systems and how they export their data. It works especially well when systems can't edit their exports so you need to clean up data a lot before they are combined into a single file. It is less appropriate a solution when you are trying to combine large data, let's say thousands of files and need some sort of platform to deduce analytic patterns out of it. This is more used for data preparedness rather than big data analysis. This may have changed with recent updates, however they do not do a good job of updating customers on new releases so keeping track of their developments is something worth doing if data management is an important part of your/your company's role.

Best fit for this product: - Advanced or Sophisticated Enterprise Search platform: If you spend effort on your search capabilities, Endeca is the tool. - If you are looking for capabilities to search and navigate similar to a relational-database system, then Endeca is not the best fit. - If you are spending effort to drive customer experience, especially around customer interaction with your web application, Endeca can help with that in a multichannel environment.

If you do not have a large budget and are a large organization, I would steer clear of Actuate. If you are looking to do very complex washboarding, I would not use them. Your developers have to be very skilled to work with this. Plan to bring in consultants if necessary to help your process. Adhoc reporting is weak. If your pricing is user based and you expand, this could be very expensive.

• ReportMiner's OCR accuracy is flawless to my experience. I use the program to pull values from check details, and have yet to find an error.
• ReportMiner's interface is easy to learn. I never even got formal training on the program. I watched some YouTube videos and learned as I went.
• ReportMiner training personnel is very knowledgeable and quick to respond. Anytime I ran into a problem I could not figure out on my own, they would get back with me within a half a day.

• Provides exact, correct counts of items in its dimensions.
• Allows for flexible, out-of-the-box boosting of content (based on combo of any/all of: user profile, date, dimension being browsed and search keyword).
• It has a reasonably good admin interface for the administration of boosting/promotion rules for the business user.

• The report outputs can vary across different types such as HTML, PDF, and Excel
• Their open source offering is very sufficient
• There are great boards and blogs for developers and engineers to expand and use their features.
• The people from the company that I've worked with are professional and courteous.

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• Could provide some features to help with advanced analytics for big data. (i.e. larger data sets)
• Too much clutter on their Youtube page, they should highlight the tutorials so they are easier to find for new users. Get rid of old tutorial video playlists so the organization is clean and up to date.
• Have sales rep follow up with customers to offer product updates, new product releases, and do check ins to see if customers have suggestions for feature improvement.

• Endeca's page builder is not fit to be an enterprise product - it is just BAD!
• It is not easy for a non-user to understand Endeca quickly
• Multi-index search (or any complex search implementation) is not easy to setup in Endeca

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• The documentation on all the available features, but most importantly on the scripting side, can be improved
• The standard look & feel of some basic options, like parameter selection or sorting and filtering, looks dated and can't be customized
• The server portal needs to provide better tools
• More integration is needed with other OpenText products

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It is the best way to get a multi line record from pdf to Excel in one row.

If the solution is implemented well and the business understands the purpose of the Endeca stack, it offers a great way for a business to explore and benefit from its existing data. From my experience, the Endeca solution has exposed data patterns to a business that were not thought about or explored before because of the lack of available tools to properly expose these patterns

I am no longer working for the company that was using Actuate but I believe they would continue to use it because the stitching costs would be to high. It would require a complete rewrite of the reports and the never version of Actuate (BIRT) even required an almost complete report rewrite

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The system itself is very usable, and with proper training is very sensible in its organization and method of operation. There are some downsides in initial setup in the way things are imported (or not in some cases) in setting up properties and dimensions. Overall however it's amazingly flexible in terms of the content it can index and make available for search.

It is quite intuitive to use. It is fit specifically for doing sentiment, emotion, and intention analysis as well as text classification and text summarization. I would have given 10 if it is fit for the purpose of doing image processing and analysis as well. There is a huge market to analyze video and image data.

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Support has been very good, and the trainers for the various Endeca courses have all been very willing to help long after the classes have been completed, so in the instances where we're waiting on support from Oracle, it's often that the members of their training arm can help us out as well.

Always there on the front and backend for us and the client.

The training is actually really good, and absolutely necessary - although this is software that has great documentation, the documentation itself is so vast, that it would be difficult to learn haphazardly, not to mention being incredibly time consuming to do so. Online training probably would have been fine except for the fact that having someone look over your shoulder to see where you're going wrong is helpful. This also allowed our team to sit in a single room and converse about functionality, etc. that would have been difficult to facilitate via an online class.

We did some online Q&A with the Oracle team, but I would definitely recommend doing an in person class if you have a large team that will be attending - there's definitely no replacements for a large class of technically oriented staff members who can drive conversation about specific topics that might surface.

There were some features we were hoping to get implemented in this particular release of Endeca, but were unable to facilitate those requirements due mostly to timeline. Having seen several other implementations, we will definitely have future iterations to add functionality and improve upon our implementation of Endeca. For the time being, we are satisfied with our implementation as it turned out.

I have never actually used another program like ReportMiner. Before I was just using PDF viewers such as Adobe that had OCR capabilities. I would have to select a range of numbers and copy and paste to Excel. It was tedious, slow, and sometimes error prone. I chose to learn ReportMiner because it saves me at least 4 times the amount of time I would have to use by copy and pasting.

Oracle Endeca was the best option that we evaluated by far. It gave us the most flexibility and ability to meet our objectives and had features that were not offered by the competing products we evaluated, but which we very much wanted, and this was why we decided to go with Oracle Endeca versus another platform

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It is vastly superior to these in many ways, for complex reporting it is a much more sophisticated solution. Visualizations are very good. Javascript extensibility is very powerful, others don't support this or as well. Pentaho and MS are both OLAP oriented. Pentaho is moving more toward big data, which was not our primary focus. Others are stuck in the Crystal Reports Band metaphor.

• Efficient and automated data extraction. Saves time and resources.
• User-friendly interface and good documentation. It is therefore easiest to learn and apply in a short time.
• Documents, which have various formats of data tables or arrangement, needed a lot of manual fixing. So it required a lot of time for validation and quality control.

• It is a searching tool, and hard to estimate its impact on conversion.
• It does its job regarding better searching; In terms of efficiency, it's hard to say: it has big learning curve. It requires a dedicated Endeca developer to work on it.
• Compared to Solr, it is way too complicated.

• Actuate can handle 50 to 60 sub reports inside a report very well.
• Dynamically creating the datasource, chart, graph, reports are the main advantages. We can do any level of drilling, and can create a performance matrix dashboard efficiently.