Best fit for this product: - Advanced or Sophisticated Enterprise Search platform: If you spend effort on your search capabilities, Endeca is the tool. - If you are looking for capabilities to search and navigate similar to a relational-database system, then Endeca is not the best fit. - If you are spending effort to drive customer experience, especially around customer interaction with your web application, Endeca can help with that in a multichannel environment.
TIBCO Jaspersoft Community Edition is very powerful platform that has enhanced smooth running of workflows across our organization. The system operation has greatly created positive development infrastructure in our company due to excellent planning from the data analytics. The cost running this product is low as compared to similar software and easy to learn how it works. It provides comprehensive reports that affect each department and offers solution to most challenges affecting our systems.
Provides exact, correct counts of items in its dimensions.
Allows for flexible, out-of-the-box boosting of content (based on combo of any/all of: user profile, date, dimension being browsed and search keyword).
It has a reasonably good admin interface for the administration of boosting/promotion rules for the business user.
Custom design reports in Jaspersoft Studio. There is a lot of flexibility to customize reports. You can create easy reports in a quick time frame or complex report in a bit more time.
The company does not need a 100% developer to develop reports. Someone with some level of developer experience could use Jasper Studio
Jasper also provides a stand-alone web server to deploy your reports. This opens up a lot of Jaspersoft Studio files.
There is a lot of time and effort put into the software. Years of input that improved all levels of the applications. Jasperstudio, Jasperserver, a manual, the community, etc.
Flexibility is awesome, you can do almost anything. Having well-rounded REST API or you can use the Java Studio.
There is a lot out of the box functionality. Scheduler, stand-alone reports, report output formats, logging settings, customization of GUI to a degree, permissions, roles, and user setup Studio, etc.
For the most part, it is quite intuitive, however, you need to have an intermediate knowledge of HTML to be able to construct unique promotional web pages. Nowadays, with WordPress and other content management systems that have WYSIWYG interfaces, Endeca may prove to be challenging to HTML beginners.
If the solution is implemented well and the business understands the purpose of the Endeca stack, it offers a great way for a business to explore and benefit from its existing data. From my experience, the Endeca solution has exposed data patterns to a business that were not thought about or explored before because of the lack of available tools to properly expose these patterns
Even though there are challenges with Architecture, sizing and other areas with Jaspersoft provided that Jaspersoft comes up with the right set of innovation, performance, scalability, and documentation in future it will be great expansion (win-win) situation for the clients and as well as Jaspersoft.
The system itself is very usable, and with proper training is very sensible in its organization and method of operation. There are some downsides in initial setup in the way things are imported (or not in some cases) in setting up properties and dimensions. Overall however it's amazingly flexible in terms of the content it can index and make available for search.
The overall performance of this platform has been excellent. It is easy to work with the user interface. Creation of digital content and publishing on our social media platforms during marketing has been easy. Running our applications and upgrading our system to meet international standards has been successful. The user dashboard displays reports and performance of all departments effectively.
Support has been very good, and the trainers for the various Endeca courses have all been very willing to help long after the classes have been completed, so in the instances where we're waiting on support from Oracle, it's often that the members of their training arm can help us out as well.
We have only had a couple of tickets to be open while using Jaspersoft. Each time we have a very prompte responses that would meet our expectations. We always felt that our issues were being address in a timely manner
The training is actually really good, and absolutely necessary - although this is software that has great documentation, the documentation itself is so vast, that it would be difficult to learn haphazardly, not to mention being incredibly time consuming to do so. Online training probably would have been fine except for the fact that having someone look over your shoulder to see where you're going wrong is helpful. This also allowed our team to sit in a single room and converse about functionality, etc. that would have been difficult to facilitate via an online class.
We did some online Q&A with the Oracle team, but I would definitely recommend doing an in person class if you have a large team that will be attending - there's definitely no replacements for a large class of technically oriented staff members who can drive conversation about specific topics that might surface.
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.
There were some features we were hoping to get implemented in this particular release of Endeca, but were unable to facilitate those requirements due mostly to timeline. Having seen several other implementations, we will definitely have future iterations to add functionality and improve upon our implementation of Endeca. For the time being, we are satisfied with our implementation as it turned out.
New releases can be very buggy, also lacking when it comes to standard time zones and formats that are outside the US. As a company we never feel comfortable implementing a new release for at least 3-6 months due to errors that are found
Endeca is brilliant for setting up simple and straightforward search platforms that utilise only basic search rules. On the other hand, Apache Solr supports far more complex search platform implementations, including multi-index search. Overall, I would say Solr is far more powerful than Endeca.
Crystal reports is very expensive and does not integrate well with java based servers. Jasper also provides community edition, if we every want to downgrade the use, we always have the option of eliminating the server and using the reports as they are. Jasper also give you the opportunity to build BI on case by base basis including Dashboards.
It is a searching tool, and hard to estimate its impact on conversion.
It does its job regarding better searching; In terms of efficiency, it's hard to say: it has big learning curve. It requires a dedicated Endeca developer to work on it.
Jaspersoft Community Edition has not had any significant impact on our ROI as we have purchased the commercial edition of the product.
The only impact on ROI is that when we bring on new developers, he or she can begin work using the community edition while awaiting the installation of the commercial edition.
