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Jaspersoft in a high demand 24/7 operation
Updated March 08, 2018

Jaspersoft in a high demand 24/7 operation

Gerald Meachem | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO Jaspersoft

  • Support is excellent - very quick response time and good information.
  • Report server seems to run quickly and reliably without much attention.
  • Training material readily available.
  • Significant ability to customize the product
  • I would like to see an administrator dashboard in the report server tool to monitor report generations, report failures, currently running reports with ability to kill long running reports, etc.
  • GUI access to the many, many settings that can be added/tweaked on the report server.
  • I would like to see easier access to add functions within the report without writing an external jar file. we don't use java on a day to day basis so I found the process of adding a custom library of functions a little awkward. We also allow our users to make copies of our reports to customize on their own. Since they are non-technical, the process of writing a function for themselves is usually over their heads.
  • Our customers are very much missing the ability to select specific fields from a print-ready report display and export to Excel. Our previous product had it and we hear it from everyone as we replace it. Current export of a print-formatted report to Excel tries to render it so it looks visibly the same, but it just ends up unusable for any sort of normal spreadsheet usage.
We were using Actuate e-reporting. The product suited our needs but the vendor was difficult to work with as far as licensing and contract issues. Also relatively much more expensive. We didn't actually even evaluate BIRT as a replacement due to the poor relationship. So I can only really compare to the e-report designer/iportal/iserver combination. We found the architecture to be very similar. We found Actuate's report server software to be better for monitoring job executions which was quite important to us. We found the designers to be similar in quality. Jasper studio seems to be less mature, but more feature rich. However some of the features don't quite work as expected. We found more things could be accomplished with Jasper without resorting to writing code. We were somewhat surprised by the lack of Jasper's support for printing to printers, but in the end it has not been an issue and was easily worked around. The support and ease of generating PDFs from Jasper is quite good.
We evaluated Pentaho as well on the road to a replacement. We found it to be similar to Jasper but felt Jasper had the edge with exposure and install base.
I found Jasper to be quite flexible. Many ways to do things. The server side seems pretty robust. I found it to be a little on the complex side for developing reports. Some of the expression language has unexpected behavior that a more polished product likely would not have. Unless you are a developer or technical by nature, Studio report designer may not be for you. The tables work quite well though.

Jaspersoft Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
7.0
Pixel Perfect reports
7
Customizable dashboards
Not Rated
Report Formatting Templates
Not Rated
7.0
Drill-down analysis
Not Rated
Formatting capabilities
7
Report sharing and collaboration
Not Rated
8.0
Publish to Web
Not Rated
Publish to PDF
8
Report Versioning
Not Rated
Report Delivery Scheduling
Not Rated
Delivery to Remote Servers
Not Rated
Not Rated
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
Not Rated
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
Not Rated
7.0
Multi-User Support (named login)
7
Role-Based Security Model
7
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
7
Single Sign-On (SSO)
Not Rated
Not Rated
Responsive Design for Web Access
Not Rated
Mobile Application
Not Rated
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
Not Rated
7.0
REST API
7
Javascript API
Not Rated
iFrames
Not Rated
Java API
Not Rated
Themeable User Interface (UI)
Not Rated
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
Not Rated

Support has been very responsive, and very helpful in my experience. They are quick to respond initially and quick to respond to followup questions/information. They provide solutions or workarounds quickly. If the answer is a "working as designed" sort of response, they provide a very thorough reason why. The support portal is easy to use.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None

TIBCO Jaspersoft Support

Yes - We support multiple customers of healthcare software frequently operating in a 24X7 environment. We need to be able to provide solutions to problems with a very quick turnaround.

Using TIBCO Jaspersoft

I think it's a tool well suited for a software developer. Others with less coding skills could struggle somewhat with the tool. I find java a little unforgiving as a language for expressions and not very user friendly for the technically dis-inclined. Sometimes the numeric conversions cause issues (who knew that 0 and 0.0 would cause different things to happen). Previous experience with a reporting tool that used visual basic for its' expressions that I found much simpler to use. On the other hand, java is so widespread, you can easily google the syntax to accomplish what you need to do.
ProsCons
Technical support not required
Difficult to use
Slow to learn
Feel nervous using
Lots to learn
  • adding simple changes to table based reports through the screen viewer is quite nice. sorting, filtering, hiding and showing columns, etc. Also the ability to save those changes as a new report format.
  • the timezone shifting on dates and times printed on the report was surprisingly easy. we were using TIMEZONE WITH LOCAL TIMEZONE database types with Oracle to accomplish the timezone shifting for us, but Jasper accomplishes the same thing with any date/time data type.
  • comparing report changes from one version to the next. Since the report is all XML, it's a simple visual diff.
  • Determining what reports are currently executing without diving into the API, and creating your own UI to manage them.
Yes, but I don't use it