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Jaspersoft - Ease of reporting.
Updated March 01, 2018

Jaspersoft - Ease of reporting.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO Jaspersoft Community Edition

Jaspersoft is being used as a part of reporting application for reporting purposes to our enterprise product for SAAS, Hosted clients.
Mainly targeted for Admin users to do the below tasks:

1. Day to day reporting needs
2. Scheduling the reports to end users who look for transactions happening in the parent enterprise system.
3. Customize the reports based on company formats.
4. One part of our company product (acquired) uses Dashboard features of Jaspersoft

Also the Jaspersoft is being used to track the compliance of mandatory readiness attended by internal employees of company.
  • Very intuitive tool - An Advanced reporting user can figure out in a day on the end to end operations.
  • Easy customization - Simple changes in UI makes it less headache for the end user who maintains the tool. Being an open source product (offers Jasper web services) makes a lot developer friendly compared to SSRS, Cognos etc.
  • Easy Connectivity - Can connect to any data source (can connect to multiple data sources) for a single report - can be customized.
  • Community - A very strong community available online, videos - on basic how to questions, also provides assistance to use case specific scenarios.
  • Ease of Reporting - Can create a reports with in few clicks with out struggle.
  • Domain Designer - A very powerful tool you can create a dataset using clicks with out writing SQL code.
  • OnDemand Scheduling - A very good scheduling feature and a has got lot more simplistic compared to other popular tools like Cognos.
  • Jasper Studio - Very good programmatic tool (desktop tool) lets you customize the reports more company specific, can embed complex coding with 3rd party languages like Java, Groovy (scripting language).
  • Inconsistent Errors - Crash dump errors annoys end users while not giving an clue of the actual reason of the failure. Everything has to be manually dealt by admins who need to tediously investigating through the error logs and investigating the crash dump errors or need to enable auditing which will tax the overall system.
  • Stability , Performance issues - You can experience a lot of Performance issues with the increase of complexity in programming SQL queries but there are majority of performance bottle necks with in the product architecture on the supportability.
  • Scaling - There are lot of hiccup's while scaling the product to huge set of audiences on a large scale mainly due to vagueness on the documentation and test results provided from Jasper support team. Need to invest a lot of internal perf testing before rolling this to large scale users for any reporting needs.
  • Data source connectivity issues - You can face multiple connectivity errors across firewall, windows firewall, 3rd party driver issues mainly due to lack of in-house integration of the product. As the entire product is designed in Java and Java has a lot of issues in supporting MS platforms.
  • Shortsightedness in Roadmap - Lack of Dynamism in product features - Product Managers at Jasper team dont offer much of the dynamic features offered from Tableau, SSRS, Cognos ex: optional/ forced parameters not available in legacy versions - available only in the recent versions. Also restricting schema to end user has to be dealt at the database level by the DBA teams, this feature available of restricting schema is not available from Jasper team.
  • Jasper studio still needs to be scaled up to a lot of extent compared to MS- BIDS - Visual studio, Cognos - Report Studio - especially in terms of supporting multi dataset based queries in a single band of the report, parameters support with multiple datatypes.
  • Support model not matching business model of customers - Any complex issue on legacy versions becomes a lot more challenge in dealing with Jasper team as they force you to upgrade with out understanding the dependencies on production environments. Getting a hotfix becomes lot more challenging. The front line of engineers do a basic troubleshooting with out understanding the actual problem, passing through several levels becomes exhausting before the actual engineer shows up who can fix the issue.
  • Integration with 3rd party authentications - You can face a lot of challenges with authentication with 3rd party clients as there is no clear cut documentation, steps available from the Jaspersoft
Of course, there are challenges in the evolution of Jasper and it may take some time to become a stable product. With Jasper 6.4 the stability is improvised a lot compared to previous versions(5.5).

But I would recommend Jasper to any team for the following reasons.
1. Simplicity of design (Any basic excel user can figure out the steps). (Compared to SSRS, Cognos).
2. Ease of scheduling (love the feature of "run immediately", "Schedule in the background"). (Compared to SSRS, Cognos).
3. Can think of going to establishing a monitoring reports for any production unit where the changes in data happen more frequently.
It fits the perfect bill for SMB units who operate on a small scale if you are looking for the below needs:

1. Simple reports with few complexities in SQL queries etc.
2. Fits for less no.of users (reporting admins, reporting users). Hardware needs to scaled up accordingly with the increase of usage/ concurrency of the reporting system.
3. Fits for simple scheduling purposes where there are few managers who want reports on a daily basis.
4. Simple dashboards.
5. Monitoring purposes. (Production unit).

in case of implementing for large enterprises need to consider the below aspects.
1. No.of users
2. Need to do perf test every report based on concurrency before moving to production.
3. Constant monitoring of reporting servers when the load/ concurrency goes high.
4. Restrict dashboards to only few reporting admins compared to large scale.
5. Constant changes in hardware based on the usage. (physical resources needs to be beefed up in case of higher usage).
6. Check the costly queries, constant fine tuning.
7. Architecture of Web should be made in such away that you can upgrade Jasper web with out impacting your DB. So that in case if Jasper team informs to upgrade for couple of fixes.

Jaspersoft Community Edition Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
8.5
Pixel Perfect reports
8
Customizable dashboards
9
Report Formatting Templates
Not Rated
8.0
Drill-down analysis
7
Formatting capabilities
Not Rated
Report sharing and collaboration
9
9.4
Publish to Web
8
Publish to PDF
10
Report Versioning
9
Report Delivery Scheduling
10
Delivery to Remote Servers
10
7.5
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
9
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
6
8.8
Multi-User Support (named login)
9
Role-Based Security Model
8
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
10
Single Sign-On (SSO)
8
8.3
Responsive Design for Web Access
9
Mobile Application
9
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
7
9.0
REST API
Not Rated
Javascript API
Not Rated
iFrames
Not Rated
Java API
Not Rated
Themeable User Interface (UI)
Not Rated
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
9

Support and Training

Jaspersoft Engineering/support quality has improvised a lot in terms of responsiveness recently compared to previous experiences post upgrading to Premier license.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Knowledgeable team
Support cares about my success
Escalation required
  • Implemented in-house
-> Have the system thoroughly tested with production data being restored in a dummy environment before delivering to end users.
-> Don't rely on domains/dataset feature a lot especially while giving access to end users and this should be restricted to admins alone.
  • Online training
  • Self-taught
I would recommend any company/client who is looking for Jaspersoft as a solution internally/externally(customer facing) it's better to have the engagement of Jasper consultant to review the system and embed best practices post go-live/pre go-live so that there will be minimal issues.

Using TIBCO Jaspersoft Community Edition

500 - Customer Support
Cloud Team
Engineering
Research and Development
20 - SQL server (since we host Jasper on this platform).
Linux
Windows
Jasper server
  • Used for native core suite reporting solution (2 major products from our organization use this solution).
  • Automation of monitoring reports from Cloud team
  • Automation reporting for monitoring purposes - Some of the system level alerts, major issues on the application can be tracked provided that information is captured in the database.
  • Designing complex reports using Jasper Studio with custom layouts.
  • Expansion of Automation reporting for monitoring purpose - This serves a great purpose and when we realized that the system has a lot of potential to grow around this area.
Even though there are challenges with Architecture, sizing and other areas with Jaspersoft provided that Jaspersoft comes up with the right set of innovation, performance, scalability, and documentation in future it will be great expansion (win-win) situation for the clients and as well as Jaspersoft.

Evaluating TIBCO Jaspersoft Community Edition and Competitors

Yes - Microsoft SSRS, Report Viewer 2008, Microsoft OWC. The reason we replaced them is primarily due to customers started seeing issues with pulling huge data/scheduling abilities.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Prior Experience with the Product
  • Existing Relationship with the Vendor
  • Analyst Reports
Price ,Product features comes very handy for us when this decision was taken by our product management team.
I would definitely question the ability of performance scaling documentation, best practices, limitations to be found during the evaluation process.

TIBCO Jaspersoft Community Edition Implementation

Yes - -> Development, customizing and integrating according to the core product design.
-> Deployment of Jasperservers across the server PODS.
-> Deploying of customer tenants.
Change management was a major issue with the implementation - There is a lot of internal documentation needed to be developed in terms of maintenance perspective about the steps to be taken between upgrades.
  • Outages - this was mainly due to lack of documentation related to steps to be taken care of the upgrade.
  • Broken Reports - this was due to certain XML tags needed to be edited post upgrade to higher version utilizing the legacy feature.

TIBCO Jaspersoft Community Edition Support

Yes - Seldom certain issues on Gray areas of Jaspersoft related to Schedules, Outages we need to have live troubleshooting session from Jaspersoft Engineering team in these scenarios buying a premier license will have a huge impact in resolving the issues faster.
Yes - Yes we had one issue which created a regression over the delivery of the patch Jaspersoft identified the bug and delivered a hotfix within 2 days after reverting the patch.
Yes, we had one issue which created a regression over the delivery of the patch Jaspersoft identified the bug and delivered a hotfix within 2 days after reverting the patch.

Using TIBCO Jaspersoft Community Edition

There is a still left out feature - Dashboards which still needs to be finetuned from the Jaspersoft engineering team. Sometimes you can see the reports hanging up on certain scenarios.
ProsCons
Like to use
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Feel confident using
Lots to learn
  • Adhoc views, Domain Designer
  • Custom calculated fields
  • Few end user formatting options
  • Scheduling to ftp, repository and email
  • Adhoc views - viewing the data
  • Loading of parameters page especially while loading huge datasets
  • Jaspersoft studio
Yes - I had used mobile interface occasionally to test the platform performance of the core reporting product developed in Jaspersoft it was good for reporting purposes but didn't scale up well for dashboards.