Item: Quadient Inspire
Rating: 10
Author: Ed Walter

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As a service provider across many industries, RRD has a wide range of requirements for document composition. These reach across the spectrum from managing precomposed document streams through document composition from data with CCM integration and a great variety of blended requirements. We represent customers in nearly every aspect of business and consumer communications from insurance to medical to utility to transactional to kitting and more. These varied industries also have equally varying output requirements. The Inspire tool suite fills many of these requirements with a solid performance that we rely on for continuous automated production. The flexibility of Inspire Designer is second to none and a critical part of our solution architecture.

Pros and Cons

Highly flexible data ingestion
Clear and powerful workflow design that makes support easy to understand as teams evolve
Great internal debugging tool that simplifies and accelerates the development cycle
Powerful scripting structure available at nearly every aspect of data management, composition, and finishing allowing for specialized requirements not available in the standard toolset to be met

More flexibility in licensing would be beneficial to our unique requirements as a large service provider
The Min/Max tool is an easy way to extract either extreme from each field of a data set, but it doesn't generally produce viable data for a complex data structure. A tool that could generate "test" data in a similar way but with the ability to provide parameters regarding the construction would be very beneficial. Often, good test data is often a major delay in starting or testing composition development. This is especially true where PII is involved.
As stated earlier, the debug tools are a fantastic tool within Inspire Designer, but there are times when the resulting error seems a bit cryptic. One way to enhance this functionality would be adding a link from the error to a related discussion on the user forum.
Add a tool as part of the proofer that is a robust screen reader. This could test for ADA compliance and highlight things that don't meet the standard and link back to the exact area in the design where the tag is available.
I'd like to be able to have two views of the document tree open simultaneously showing different segments of the hierarchy.
I would like ways to more easily gather related document resources (flows, etc.) and manage their names and family containers other than individually (or having to export as XML and try to manage that behemoth without making a mistake that kills the workflow)

Return on Investment

I am very involved in solution architecture, but not so much in managing the financial aspect. I would not be able to provide this type of detail

Support Rating

Although I do like the simplicity of creating a ticket simply by sending an email, I would like the ability to view the progress of an issue (including multiple tickets from my company) in a tool designed for this purpose. I likely support more of the minor requests personally before they are sent as support requests. But those that go do go out as tickets are difficult to manage unless someone includes me on the request. I am not in favor of more emails. So a tool would be best for me. I do enjoy the robust nature of university.quadient.com. This is a fantastic resource for myself and others at RRD. I would like a more structured and scheduled way to review the underlying architecture and a way for us to map that for review as well as a way for Quadient to present how modifications to this architecture could benefit our production.

Key Insights

Do you think Quadient Inspire delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Quadient Inspire's feature set?

Yes

Did Quadient Inspire live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Quadient Inspire go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Quadient Inspire again?

Yes

Usability

I provide internal training to our developer base. I think the basics are very easy to comprehend and you are left with a universe of possibilities for growth. But this question is a bit like asking someone how easy is Math. The initial concepts (1+1=2) are very simple and easily expand on more involved ones. But, like math, these building blocks open the doors to an ever-growing range of capability. Even to the point of crafting things that have never been done before. Inspire is far from a lightweight tool. But it is very easy to begin the journey of discovery into all that it has to offer.

Professional Services

I don't have a great deal of experience with Quadient Inspire Professional Services. What experiences I have had have always resulted in a viable product within the agreed timeframe. Sometimes the cost and times projected that are available to be agreed to are questionable, but that is the nature of the beast.

Likelihood to Recommend

I've been using Quadient Inspire for 14 years. I'm still waiting for the realistic design challenge based on variable data document construction that I am not able to meet. I've had some pretty good challenges, but none that were unsolvable.

An engine for success

Overall Satisfaction with Quadient Inspire