Crystal vs. Windward Core

All of our applications server in the new company that we bought are windows based, despite that there are other alternative to build the report and dashboard, it is something that has worked wonder for us, apart from it is only available in Windows and indexing data that might eat the resource, I still see the application as one of the major player for reporting

Great for Technical Users. It's great for people a bit more on the technical side. It allows developers to quickly create and modify reporting templates without having to modify source code or make updates to a repository. Potentially Difficult for Non-Technical Users. Making substantial changes to the data portions of reporting can be a bit difficult for non-technical users. While Windward's tools for this are great, it still requires an understanding of the database schema which not all users will have.

Incentivized

• Consolidate data from several data sources
• Low to no code report generation
• Configurable

• Native Office output -- not nested tables and/or horrible RTF like other tools generate.
• Ease of use -- once the data sources are set up, creating tables is as simple as drag and drop (okay, maybe not exactly that simple, but you can certainly create a table of data using drag and drop, then format it and manipulate it as needed).
• Responsive developers and support -- when I've had questions, they've been addressed VERY quickly and professionally.

Incentivized

• This is bound for Windows OS, hard to find similar alternative on other OSs
• Be careful in Indexing your data, as it will consume resources

• It is hard to pick out the tags if they are mixed in with a block of text.
• Using report variables in select statements causes the selection list of available fields to not show anything.
• The color themes do not match the office selection and it feels very disconnected.

For the most part, the Windward report designer is intuitive for our users; but there are a few areas where it is less intuitive. In these cases, our users need to search Windwards support wiki site, or even contact their support technicians. This can also be due to the short time we've had Windward and our lack of knowledge.

Incentivized

Support is something they take pride in. Once an issue is raised, they are quick to respond and provide details on a fix. No complaints on support here.

We tried to explore other options but we didn't explore other options too long as it will risk our business process and business outcome, as what we want from the processes in both reports and dashboard are giving us a satisfactory result, so familiarity is why we still using it till today and some foreseeable future

We evaluated several other products to integrate with our new software, but Windward Studios was an obvious standout above the majority. Other applications required some level of software development knowledge and experience to create templates and a much steeper learning curve. After consideration of ease of use, as well as a cost-comparison between different products, Windward Studios was the most suitable product to meet our needs.

Incentivized

• Without the application, our lending business will be in complete stop, as our applications are wrote in Windows based
• We are processing 300 Loans/Month, taking it as $10000 per loan, having this not working properly will cost potential $150.000 revenue

• As a fully integrated solution, the ROI is impacted when a client gets stickier with our solution because they see the benefit of Windward.
• Support has been fantastic for our development team so that as we integrate the solutions we have a clear and clean design.

Incentivized