Item: Windward Core
Rating: 10
Author: Constantinos Tsiartas, CIMP

Overall Satisfaction with Windward Studios

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have embedded Windward Studios in our Loan Automation Solution and provided a document and report generation module with ease. Given that the design is totally done in MS Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint), we prepared the templates for 40+ legal agreements and 20+ reports within weeks with minimal coding.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Design documents and reports with MS Office (WORD, EXCEL, POWERPOINT). This can be done by the business and not only be the IT. Template maintenance, which is usually mostly on content, can be done solely by business users.
Insert tags and business logic within documents to show/hide paragraphs depending on data or user input.
Integrates easily with 3rd party applications and it can also be used as the document and report generation engine of your software solution.
It can pull data from multiple sources (SQL, XML, OData, etc).

Cons

Better and more updated documentation. There is a wealth of functionality and the knowledge base does not reveal this much. You must be very specific in what you are looking for.
Web service consumption besides OData to pull data from other systems directly into the template would have taken Windward to another level.
User support in European timezones. :-)

Return on Investment

Windward Studios is value for money. It is packed with features at a fraction of the cost compared to other tools.
Windward Studios is business friendly. The designer is Office applications (WORD, EXCEL, POWERPOINT). This limits the function of IT in the preparation of data sources. If the data architecture is done correctly, then you can have business users changing data tags as well.
Embedding Windward into existing applications provides a DocGen and report module and gives a new life to even legacy applications. Sometimes the drive to modify/change an application is the lack of reporting/visibility in the operations. With Windward, you can have a query and analysis module developed with ease and even act as a BI tool.

Usability

It's user-friendly. The designer is in Office applications.

Alternatives Considered

Crystal Reports, PDF Libraries, XML based templates and .NET.

Likelihood to Recommend

Windward Studios is best suited for document and report generation. Where the design of output is required, Windward Studios is a must.

Windward Studios is less suited where lots of input fields are required, such as for electronic forms. Windward is not a UI platform for data capturing. It is for presenting data.

Comments

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David Thielen
commented 7 years ago
Constantinos - thank you for the wonderful review. As to your suggestions: Better documentation - I agree. We are working on this and recently replaced wiki.windward.net with https://ohana.windwardstudios.com. But this is still a work in progress and you will see it get even better over the next several months. Other web services - this has been a conundrum for us. We do already support RESTful calls for XML and JSON as well as OData. But as to W3C, SOAP, etc - we've looked at them but we have not been able to come up with a way to access them that would be easy for non programmers. These can be so complex that even many programmers struggle with them. As they simplify these (OData was a big step in this direction), we'll support the ones we can make easy. User support in European timezones - we're looking at this. We'd like to extend to 24x5-1/2 (Monday morning New Zealand - Friday evening Hawaii). We have to figure out how we'll do it, what it'll cost, and then what the optional surcharge would be. Again, thank you for the very nice review.

Document Generation made easy!