Jedox Review (developer)

Best suited for financial consolidation and / or as a highly customized and compact EPM / BI solution (up to 100 CCU) with individual workflows, planning and reporting functionalities, with moderate number of users (no restrictions for any industry, all industries are covered well). It also has advanced reporting & data analysis requirements and provides an integration and reporting layer of imported data from different external systems (via ETL). It can help with migrating your legacy Excel-based business models to the Web.

It is not well suited for Enterprise BI applications with expecting >500 CCU (users at the same time working with the system) - this may cause serious performance issues, as all data is kept in RAM. Jedox is also less suited for applications with heavy document management requirements (document management is not an out of the box functionality in Jedox and rather requires custom development through custom widgets etc.).

The implementation of SSO, SAML Authentication, HTTPS, Server splitting (Frontend / Backend servers) could be more standardized and made more user friendly to set up (e.g. via setup guide). Otherwise the implementation of Jedox is quick and simple when compared to other similar technologies.

Pros:
- Highly configurable on application level due to cell-based-approach in the web-frontend (create your own CI, customized frontends, individual workflows, own variables, buttons, controls etc.)
- Some of the global parameters (cache size, dropdown paging settings, smtp settings etc., file storage path) can be set via so called keys directly in web by poweruser (no need to search for physical config files on server)
- Very flexible user rights approach, user rights can be configured on cell-level

Cons:
- Even with the possibility to adjust global parameters via keys in web, not all of the important parameters can be easily configured (like how the standard toolbar should be shown to the end-user (as not all of the functions from the toolbar may be needed by end-users and you would like to
disable them), how the context menus should be shown to the users etc.)
- Attaching Jedox to corporate Idam systems (if required) is not straightforward and may be pretty tricky to set up

Jedox support in general is a professional and fast responding team. An easy-to-use ticketing system is in place. Bug-related questions are solved fast (responses come usually in a few hours after the question), but some questions / tickets, that are not Jedox-related bugs (for example some advanced questions about Jedox functionality), may be forwarded to Application Management team for further processing and then it may take several days or even weeks to get a response here -> there is room for improvement here.

See the pro's and con's in the steps before

Scalability is one of the disadvantages of Jedox. Applications with >100 CCU (of course this number is very rough, as it also depends on the complexity of the application) scale poorly in comparison to other EPM vendors. With Jedox it is difficult to scale big applications as there are no standardized / easy-to-implement ways to do it. As a matter of fact, even a classic two-tier architecture (separate olap and web servers) is pretty complicated to implement with Jedox (when we keep in mind, that we are in the 21st century and you would expect to set it up in a few clicks during the Jedox installation, but you actually have to go through a bunch of Jedox config files on each server and edit the IP's and other parameters by hand in several redundant places / files to set it up properly and working; here I dont even start to speak about setting-up load balancing, adding more servers etc. ).

- Easy to use
- ETL flowgraph (graphical interactable flowchart showing your etl process)
- Lots of standard transforms (table union, views, filters, field transforms, normalization, denormalization etc.)
- Advanced transforms & coding with Groovy, Java, Javascript
- Informative logs / ETL monitor

Cons:
- Data preview is limited to certain number of rows, which may be a problem in some cases
- Copy pasting rows / entries is not possible or not effective (in some cases it is more convenient to edit the .xml file of the ETL project in notepad rather than editing the ETL project in web)
- No version control for ETL projects (check-in / check-out changes) -> this is rather a global disadvantage of all Jedox components (frontend, backend, ETL)
- Some of the connectors are not free of charge -> that means for some of the connectors special / additional licence must be acquired