Altvia Answers vs. Entrinsik Informer

Most schools that use Colleague (the Student Information System) have either UniData or SQL Server as the back-end database. If a school is currently a UniData school but has plans to move to SQL Server in the relatively near future then I'd advise against moving forward with Informer until after the conversion to SQL Server. There is a tool that will convert some reports, but there are many instances where the tool won't successfully convert the report and it will need to be re-written.

Incentivized

• Informer is pretty user-friendly. When teaching other employees how to use Informer, I typically don't have to repeat any steps or further explain how to do certain tasks because of how user-friendly it is.
• Reports in Informer are kept in a list that can be filtered by user, specific tags, or even by how recent the report was made or run. This makes it very quick and easy to find and run a specific report.
• Informer has many options for downloading the report output, including text (txt), comma separated values (csv), and even PDF.

Incentivized

• Informer needs more predefined date formats in its Column Display Editor. The existing 5 do not meet everyone's needs.
• It's a minor UI issue, but Informer's Edit Columns view stutters and displays empty space when scrolling left or right. It may be because I'm using Safari on Mac OS X, and Informer isn't designed for input devices that scroll with "momentum" (as Apple calls it).
• The Reports Listing takes longer to load reports than I believe it should. At least a progress bar displays to tell you when it's complete.

Incentivized

Informer has been handily meeting most of our reporting needs, and we've created a library of hundreds of reports that are used every day. They have a terrific support service to help when you have questions, and I've found them to be great at listening to what customers would like and adding new features. They are a small company that really listens and really cares, and I've been very pleased over the past few years getting to know them.

Since I don't know code, there are sometimes calculations that are beyond my knowledge to create. It would also be great to be able to format multiple columns at once (center, for instance), rather than having to format them individually.

Incentivized

We have 10 concurrent licenses and we average between 6-8 at any given time during the day; and we host the application.

Always able to get acceptable solutions in reasonable time from friendly support staff. Initial contact is always with knowledgeable person - not someone reading from a script trying to screen calls. Thanks Entrinsik for being in tune with my needs.

Incentivized

We bought the product on a Thursday morning, and we were writing reports on Friday afternoon. We did take about a month to manage the Mapping, Linking and Security to allow us to open it up across campus. We are now mapping from as many third-party vendors as we can to enable the creation of more ad-hoc reporting.

Our organization used to use the built in reporting tool for Datatel, but it required more knowledge about SQL so only a handful of users could actually use it. There was no customization of the output or ability to schedule the queries. If you wanted something more complex than what was available, then the programmers needed to write an extraction program to pull the data you needed

Incentivized

• We have definitely improved customer service due to better reporting using Informer. All departments are better empowered to help our students in a more timely and accurate manner.
• Using Informer has given us the ability to eliminate functionality within our ERP system and offload reporting to a data store instead of the transactional system. This has resulted in successfully upgrading our core systems and improved response times.