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It'll do for now!
Updated March 13, 2018

It'll do for now!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO Jaspersoft

  • Multi tenancy
  • Report scheduling
  • 3rd party integration
  • basic charts
  • Chart customisation could be made a lot easier for non-technical users. More control of this through the UI or right click mouse options would make it a lot better to use. Like in Tableau or Power BI.
  • The process for creating drill through charts could also be simplified through better UI options without the need to manually enter parameters and report links.
  • A better way of dealing with existing fields in already created reports that need to be changed or removed from the domain without having to browse through each report to remove the field manually beforehand.
  • The UI and feel of the ad-hoc view/report creator could be made a little more user-friendly with more UI options available without having to refer to a separate website to hunt for the appropriate APIs.
  • Have more pre-calculated chart options. Such as Pareto charts that a right click function would enable on a chart. Presently all the data has to be structured very specifically to do this. DevExpress has had this option available for a long time.
  • Ability to drill through from a Chart to tabular data instead of having to go to the crosstab view to do so
TIBCO Jaspersoft was chosen because it fitted our software cloud architecture the best and at a reasonable cost.

The rest didn't tick all the boxes at the time or were far too expensive. However, the likes of Power BI seem to be a contender now.
It's more suited if you want to integrate charts and reports directly into third-party software, however, it is limited in functionality after the fact. It's not as good for data exploration and chart creation by non/limited technical people. It's not as intuitive as other products, like Tableau and Power BI.

TIBCO Jaspersoft Community Edition Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
6.0
Pixel Perfect reports
Not Rated
Customizable dashboards
6
Report Formatting Templates
Not Rated
3.0
Drill-down analysis
2
Formatting capabilities
1
Report sharing and collaboration
6
8.3
Publish to Web
8
Publish to PDF
8
Report Versioning
Not Rated
Report Delivery Scheduling
9
Delivery to Remote Servers
8
4.5
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
5
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
4
6.3
Multi-User Support (named login)
6
Role-Based Security Model
6
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
7
5.7
Responsive Design for Web Access
5
Mobile Application
6
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
6
4.0
REST API
4
Javascript API
4
iFrames
4
Java API
4
Themeable User Interface (UI)
4
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
4

Support and Training

While the overall support response rate is very quick. A lot of bug and enhancement issues take a long time to get implemented. We do get notified of their progress, but most of the time it shows as not implemented in the next release.

The support engineers are also vastly varied with their capabilities. Some engineers respond quickly with a suitable solution, whilst others seem to stall and ask for more information. When it finally gets escalated or transferred to another engineer, the issue is more often than not, resolved quickly.
ProsCons
Kept well informed
Immediate help available
Quick Initial Response
Poor followup
Less knowledgeable
Problems left unsolved
Escalation required
Need to explain problems multiple times
Support doesn't seem to care
  • Implemented in-house
we implemented this, in-house.
I personally did not implement the system. Our infrastructure team performed this. A lot of the common gripes was the lack of online reference material and a cumbersome deployment process. However, once it's up and running, it's fairly simple to maintain.
  • Online training
We were shown a couple of things we didn't figure out initially. However possibly a more specific type of training on Jasper Studio and Jasper Ad hoc report creation might've been better.
Some reports are difficult to calculate in the ad hoc report designer. Such as normalisation calculations. Very limited online help regarding calculated measures and the correct syntax. Just a bit too much "fumbling" in the system to get things to work.
While the training was somewhat beneficial, a lot of what was taught to us was what we managed to figure out in the weeks prior. It did provide some useful tips and reference material, but overall something more tailored to our requirements would've been better.

Using TIBCO Jaspersoft

4 - Use is spread between software developers and technical service delivery consultants.
4 - We're reliant on our cloud infrastructure team to support back end config alterations and Jasper deployment. Our front end developers embed Jaspersoft with our own software. People with a technical background and some analysis exposure is required to support the service delivery side of Jaspersoft.
  • embed analytical reports into our software
  • allow for end users to explore their data which has been collected in our software
  • allows us to produce more complex reports in jaspersoft to then be embedded/referenced in our software
  • can't think of any
  • we would like to link security to individual users within our software
While it's not perfect, it still ticks more boxes than competitors and at a more competitive price. However the usability and online support still have room for a lot of improvement

Evaluating TIBCO Jaspersoft and Competitors

  • Price
  • Product Features
The product features such being able to integrate into our software and be completely managed in the cloud were the most important factors to buying the product
If we had no severe budget restraints we would've gone for something that would give users the best usability experience. Like Power BI or Tableau.

TIBCO Jaspersoft Support

No - Support should be dealt with accordingly depending on severity. For what we use the software for, time sensitive resolutions do not occur frequently enough to justify premium support.
It would also depend on what "premium" support is? If this meant 24/7 support or a dedicated support engineer, then it wouldn't be worth while for our current needs.
However, critical issues should be dealt with in a timely manner regardless of support level.
Yes - Very mixed results with support, purely dependant on the support engineer. Unfortunately, not all support engineers are created equally, which is expected. However the gap in knowledge is quite large. Some engineers will resolve an issue on the same day, some take weeks which then force us to close the request and raise it again in the hope it gets assigned to another engineer who happens to deal with it immediately.
There was a time when we were just starting to use the system. We did have to get our account manager involved, however we got all the support we requested to create and publish specific reports for one of our customers within a few days. This did help prevent any escalation issues from our end.

More decent online reference material would have been preferred, but the support team were very quick to help.

Using TIBCO Jaspersoft

There is a lot of room for improvement, but the basics are easy enough for non technical end users to pick up. It does allow them to get started, but it requires a lot more effort to customise their reports after that. The online community is very limited as well, so there isn't a lot of reference material available through a simple google search. A lot of people would have to go through the support channels to do things, which ultimately means they don't end up doing it, unfortunately.
ProsCons
None
Do not like to use
Unnecessarily complex
Requires technical support
Not well integrated
Inconsistent
Slow to learn
Cumbersome
Lots to learn
  • creating basic pivot tables
  • creating basic pivot charts
  • creating a basic tabular report
  • Chart formatting (eg. colours, labelling, axis values, spacing). You have to refer to a separate website to copy and past the functions instead of being able to do this through the Jasper Server UI.
  • Updating Domain information. Specifically when you remove a field that's in use. There should be an option to remove the field from all report/views/topics that use the field automatically, instead of having to do this manually.
  • Changes such as setting the default number of decimal places for a field has to be done through a configuration file on the server directly. This should be a UI option.
Yes - the mobile interface is a little slow and cumbersome to navigate through. However, it is still usable if you really need to pull some report information away from a PC.