Windward Reports - The Best Solution for our Business
January 25, 2019
Windward Reports - The Best Solution for our Business
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Windward Studios
We use the .NET Windward Reporting engine across several of our applications. It is our primary tool for generating sales proposals, automated presentations, orders, industry specification documents, and reports. The main reason we use Windward is the ability to not only design our reports right within MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, but also the reliable recreation of these same documents at runtime. We receive very detailed forms from our customers who want their data merged into an exact representation of that document, and Windward has reliably provided us with this functionality.
- If you have an existing Word or Excel document that you need to populate with data, then Windward is the right product for this functionality. It will reliably recreate this document in the same format (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) or in PDF (there are other formats as well but this is what we use primarily).
- The use of office documents as report templates allow us to have non-technical people submit reports to us and then we have a report writer who can tag the document for use in Windward. All of this is done without any specific programming knowledge other than AutoTag which is pretty easy to use. This allows us to free up valuable programming resources for other tasks.
- The flexibility of Windward Reports allows us to generate data sources that are formatted around our business logic knowing that we don't have to worry about some rigid data specifications or requirements from our reporting tool. However, our data is structured so we're able to pull it into AutoTag and get exactly what we need for our reporting requirements.
- I know we have wanted some more robust features in the powerpoint presentations, but to be honest we haven't looked at the update in the last two versions. So, a criticism of this wouldn't be fair because I'm not up to date on their more current PPT offerings.
- One of the issues we've had in the past is getting the licensing correct. The licensing structure is a bit strict and can be a little unwieldy at times. Once it's set up we don't ever have issues, but when upgrading or migrating servers we've had issues in the past, and if you have licensing issue it can shut down reporting on your server until it is resolved. I will say that their support team is responsive and has always helped us to work through our issues. If I were recommending Windward to someone I would mention our problems with licensing so they would pay specific when setting up their configuration, but it wouldn't keep me from recommending their services.
- The main positive impacts are providing quick turnaround on customized customer documents, and the ability to have non-programmers design our reports. We also enjoy the flexibility in data source and output that Windward provides.
- Also, once we wrote our initial reporting library, most of our work now is just report designing and passing in different variables for different report types. Outside of regular version updating there really isn't much maintenance other than constant report design.
- The only negative impact is the yearly subscription/support contract and cost increases that have to be weighed against ROI with any software subscription service.
Again, it's been so long since I've used another reporting tool it would be hard for me to say. I just know we used a couple of components, and their report designers never offered the simplicity of designing a report directly in an MS Office document.