C1 is great for creating custom reports. We have client apps where we've created some fairly complicated reports such as invoices and real estate inspections. We also use the True DBGrid in many of our apps since it is so customizable. Its grouping and filtering features are very nice and can provide summary counts and totals at the bottom or right side of the grid that are very handy.
It depends on who you are. If you are very small it won't be worth the money. If you have a very cranky site with nested tables coming out of every orifice, maybe you should look at a replatform or desktop rewrite first. If you have a site with vast numbers of custom content pages, it will work but may not be cost effective. Moovweb is well suited to you if you need the ability to control mobile experiences and respond to changes in mobile and the demands of mobile aware executives who want to move more quickly than your current IT processes allow. It is well suited if you need something quickly but also want the option to bring mobile development and support in-house some time in the next year or two (which you should). It is well suited if your desire to improve a responsive experience has been thwarted by internal fears over the impact that it might have on desktop. It is well suited if you want to experiment on mobile but do more than just change the color of a button or make a font larger. It's very good at letting a UX team try things out and see what real customers do.
The True DBGrid control is nice for showing parent/child relationships and being able to drill down and show the child data. It also is nice for showing summary totals.
The report engine is great for building custom reports for Win Forms or web apps. It can do everything that Crystal Reports can do.
They have a good selection of controls that can do just about anything you can imagine.
Moovweb takes the time to really understand your needs and challenges and is willing to work with and address them. They are partners during and AFTER implementation.
Moovweb and their implementation partner 64Labs has a fantastic response time and work ethic. They really will do what it takes.
Moovweb takes the time to share their product road map with customers.
Depending on how your site is built and maintained, there may be a different solution that will be a better option for your business and customer needs.
At the end of the day, this is another layer that is added to your development plan and time to ensure updates work across multiple devices. Moovweb is really good about the turn-time for these updates, but there still needs to be the added QA step for M&T optimization per release.
Personally as a Mobile Architect I am a huge proponent of building mobile-first responsive websites. I will always fight for a lobby for businesses to build sites with all devices in mind and not focus their attention on desktop driven sites which are then adaptively scaled to meet the demands of the business, in my opinion leading to a never ending cycle of building separate media queries to compensate for every device the business chooses to market to
Good set of customer success people combined with the flexibility to use high-quality onshore partners if workload increases at busy times. I think Moovweb's support efforts are pretty solid.
Don't spend weeks in design. Because of the way the technology works nuances of design can change very quickly further down the line. We have changed the look of the product list for a client a week before launch.
Push for getting the project into UAT within four weeks of the kickoff of the project. There are few retailer projects that need to take more than that. In my experience the more concentrated the timeline the more effective the implementation.
Check that there are no major changes planned on desktop during the time of your implementation (another reason to keep the development to four weeks).
If you have custom mobile content requirements, get them to your implementer at the start. Moovweb is great at heavy-lifting existing content, but your implementer will need to recommend solutions for custom content that will need to be tested. Get these requirements out at the start.
Make a list of your desktop plugins. Moovweb can handle them all, but they can be handled in different ways
If you have Paypal/Google Wallet and want it on mobile as part of your project, talk about that early on.
We have been in business since 1992, so we have used many different products over the years. The two other products we've primary used that are similar to ComponentOne, are Infragistics and Crystal Reports. Infragistics has a vast array of controls similar to ComponentOne. We use both to be honest and I'm not sure which one I would pick over the other. I guess that would depend on what you're trying to accomplish and if one had some control or capability that the other didn't. ComponentOne does have the reporting capabilities, where Infragistics does not.
This is the only mobile technology we have used. We went through an extensive research and vetting process. In the end Moovweb was the best choice for technology and business needs. We considered the following companies: Moovweb,Mobify, Usablenet, Mad Mobile, SKAVA, Wompmobile. Forrester has a mobile infrastrucutre services report that could be very helpful.
ComponentOne allows us to add additional features to our apps that wouldn't be found in apps written with just Visual Studio itself. That allows our clients to get more creative in their requirements, which in turn, means more work and billable hours for us!
Our apps appear more professional when using ComponentOne which helps us get projects for new clients.
ComponentOne also helps us to save clients some money since we are not having to develop things that it can do from scratch.
The implementation was 4 months from start to finish. Mobile is about 10% of our visits today and our mobile revenue for the first half is about $200K so we will have a payback in 1 -2 years.
Moovweb is not the most economical solution out there. It is one of the most comprehensive for sites needing all their content available for mobile.
