Endeca (discontinued) vs. Logi Symphony

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.

Considering it's price point in the market, Dundas BI offers a lot of functionality. They are constantly adding features and bug fixes which is great, but also means there are always updates to take if you want everything to work as expected. The standard user interface is pretty easy to understand, but it takes a while for developers and power users to become independent of documentation.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Project organization from Development to Production, you get a production and development license but I think the best way to do it is with DEV and Prod project in the Production box. Use the development box for testing updates and really crazy things. With the Dev and Prod projects on the same box, you just publish from Dev to Prod and you are done. Users only have access to the Prod projects so no one can mess up what you are working on.
• Security - If you have a hierarchy (subsidiaries, divisions, department, teams) and you want each group to see only their data, then Security hierarchies are for you!
• Dependent filters! What's this you ask? Here is an example of how it can be used, in your company you have departments and who works for what department is in your database. You make a dashboard that has a department filter (only show these departments), a managers filter, and employee filter. Not every manager or employee is in multiple departments usually only one. With dependent filters you can say that the manager and employee filter are dependent on what is selected in the departments filter so when you go to filter them they only show the managers or employees that are part of that department, and you can even it do so employees are not only dependent on department but on manager as well. Then it gets even better as it can be done in reverse as well so when you select a manager then go to the department it only shows the departments he works for (there are better situations where this is more useful).
• It is scriptable! From calculate columns, null replacements, button actions, load actions, hover over events there a way to do what you want.
• They are constantly improving and listens to your suggestions.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Not too many cons for how we use the application. It really is easy and powerful. Very powerful.
• Licensing is one thing that could be looked into. It is simple, but a little confusing. For example, if I get a license today, but a new release comes out tomorrow, it seems that the license doesn't work with the new release. Maybe that is by design, but it would be nice to clearly understand.

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

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.

We are still in the implementation phase, but so far we are finding it to be easy to use and learn. The eLearning courses that they have made available for free, as well as User Forums and other training videos have made even difficult concepts easier to understand.

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 bi-weekly calls with our Success Manager, as well as access to support as needed. Any question that I have had, multiple people have been willing and able to jump on a call to talk me through it, or send an email with the solution

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.

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.

Providing that you have the client's needs well known, creating BI content using Dundas BI is a walk in the park!

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.

Incentivized

We have tested Tableau prior to Dundas BI and though Tableau is a great package in itself, Dundas BI is much more cost-effective for our needs and requirements and hence zeroed in on Dundas BI. We have also tried microstrategy but it has a very dated UI and doesn't suit our needs in today's more modern world

Incentivized

• 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.
• Compared to Solr, it is way too complicated.

• Coming from an SQL based standard delivery model, Dundas BI has provided a fantastic rate of ROI.
• The preparation and delivery time has reduced from weeks to just a few hours.

Incentivized