Item: Jaspersoft
Rating: 8
Author: Ashley Lee

Pros and Cons

Modern looking reporting - (many other products are still archaic looking in their default selections)
Quick time-to-market turn-around from concept to reality when creating a report
Listens to customer feedback for future features - this, I believe, has greatly shaped some of the upgrade features we have seen of late that have brought the level of usefulness up for Jaspersoft and ease of use for non-developer users
Full customization of reports with scheduling and many different formats available (I mention this because some other products had limited export format options)

If you do not have a proper hardware set up, report run-time can be slow and take up a lot of resources in a shared stack. You must fine tune a lot of set up for DB servers in order to get that perfect runtime for end users
Users with very slow connections/not close to runtime locale of reporting server can have very slow experiences with reports
It is a large learning curve to gain that best-practice knowledge of using DB. This is understandable for most products. I wish that Jaspersoft had better documentation for this in the form of more shared examples in order for users to gain better business practice-use of the product. We struggled with many trial and error methods until finding those perfect solutions.

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited for formatting needs and specific export types.

Great for creating static scheduled reports because they are easily editable by non-developers.

Less suited for non-developer level users if looking for an ad hoc tool as I believe they still need to do more work in making the ease-of-use of their ad hoc tool so that it is more accessible to entry-level users to reporting software.

Support Rating

They have a great customer support ticketing system in which they always respond same-day. They offer conference calls with srcreensharing as well in order to better understand your issues.

I wish that the lower level support access came with more than just 12 cases per year though as this makes us less likely to reach out for questions on things that we then instead try to solve ourselves which results in loss of time in trying to acquire new features and or solve a problem.

Jaspersoft Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
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

Implementation Details / Implementation Partner

TIBCO professional services

Implementation Rating

They offered complete set up training and help in navigating through all of the initial report builds. We had a Jaspersoft representative walk us through all of the steps to fully set up and launch our beta service to our first client. In retrospect, I think it would have helped if the person had been a little more knowledgeable in our industry and database but that would have been a little more above-and-beyond if they could have predicted the data builds we would need for better reporting performance.

Training Types Used

In-person training

Hands on training really helped stream-line the process as we did not have to stop and wait for feedback or support every time we ran into an issue. Setting up the database and report servers as well as the first ETLs was made easier with the guidance of the training. I think that the UI navigation of the product was still something that we really did not have a handle on until at least a year of using it daily to understand all the capabilities.

In-Person Training

It did the job of getting us to our deadline we set for ourselves for initial launch. The customer we launched the product for was also there to learn about it at the same in order to better understand the capabilities. This helped greatly so that the customer was on the same page on what was possible when using jaspersoft. I think most people would not want their customers aware the product they are using is third-party but in this case it was a new experience for us both and so as we learned more about jaspersoft, we both had better communication on what the future road map was for their business needs in BI.

Online Training

Ease of Jaspersoft Training

If a user has no idea on the architecture of their database then use, I think jaspersoft is hard to understand how to use from a business user to admin level user. It involves an understanding of relationships of tables in order to create domains from which to make ad hoc views and reports. The concepts as a business user are not too hard to grasp in terms of being in an ad hoc environment and navigating the palette selections. Selecting which fields to use and so on is fairly simple with the drag and drop. What I did find was that the calculated measures and fields section to not be for beginner users and something that had to be advanced level in that I was not familiar with the syntax needed and had to make my own cheat sheet as the guidance in the ad hoc tool and online training guides was not enough.

I really appreciated the jaspersoft community as a source of open questions on the product. I myself opened a few issues to see if the community could answer my question. There is a lot of knowledge in the shared experience of other users on the quirks of jaspersoft and so it remains a good place to "google" questions related to the product. When we were training I used the community page frequently to help with small things like chart formatting to browser related issues.

Embedded BI for All

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO Jaspersoft