Item: GoodData
Rating: 4
Author: Crystal Steinbach, MBA

Overall Satisfaction with GoodData

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used GoodData as an additional reporting tool for our marketing automation software and our CRM (SFDC). We used it within our Marketing department only. The tool was able to help up bridge data between SFDC and our MAS tools. We reported on ROI, marketing engagement, contact trends, campaign performance and more.

Pros and Cons

Pros

The GoodData dashboards are interactive and easy to customize.
Permission settings were straight forward and easy to manage. They weren't fully customizable, but there was enough there to work with for our needs.
Scheduling of reports was done well. You were able to set exact times and frequencies for reports to be sent. You also could chose between dashboards or individual reports to send.

Cons

Creating reports was not the most intuitive. The set-up is different from most other tools I've used in the past. It took quite a bit of time to really get a report set up the way I like it. If you are used to setting up reports in SFDC, this will be a much different experience.
The amount of information you can have in a report was limited. If you tried to add too many columns, it wouldn't let you or you had to condense the size of the column. I didn't feel that I had too much information and would have to make my columns very narrow and export it to Excel and reformat it in order to do my analysis.
It was difficult to make some of the reports visually appealing. My supervisor was the type that liked to see reports color coded, high lighted, and bolded. The basic tabular reports were very bland. Again, I would end up exporting to Excel to format my reports before sending them off. It would've been nice to do all of that in the tool and use the scheduling functionality. Pie, bar, and any other visual reports are attractive.

Likelihood to Renew

Breadth of Deployment

Our version is not widely adopted because it was meant for the Marketing department. There are about 6 total users that have the ability to create reports. Otherwise, there are about 20 users that receive scheduled reports.

Data Integration

As long as GoodData supports the tools you are working with, it's a pretty simple set-up. I didn't experience it, but I was under the impression that if GoodData has to do additional set-up through an API or other connection, it was more intensive.

Data Visualization

Dashboards were great, and visual report formats such as charts are great. Graphs are very bland and difficult to customize. Dashboard creation was easy and all of my dashboards were very attractive.

Collaboration and Sharing

Sending reports and scheduling them was very easy. You can only send reports to users in GoodData but that wasn't an issue for us. Report formatting could improve. As I mentioned before, some of the reporting aspects on basic tabular reports is lacking. Security never seemed to be an issue when exporting or scheduling reports from GoodData.

Likelihood to Recommend

I wouldn't consider GoodData particularly advanced. But if you need a tool to meet basic reporting needs this should be considered, however, be sure to evaluate other tools as well. Be sure you have someone with reporting skills. GoodData may not be the best tool for a new user. Ask yourself what tools you need integrated and how many custom attributes you need reports based on.

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GoodData is Ok data