Entrinsik Informer vs. Tableau Server

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

Tableau Server is well suited for a data warehouse build and handling big data. Tableau data aggregation, transformation, clustering capability is powerful and easy to implement. The choice of charts and visualisation tools is outstanding. Customisation and dynamic data visualisation capability is superb. The user interface takes some time getting used to.

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

• It's good at doing what it is designed for: accessing visualizations without having to download and open a workbook in Tableau Desktop. The latter would be a very inefficient method for sharing our metrics, so I am glad that we have Tableau Server to serve this function.
• Publishing to Tableau Server is quick and easy. Just a few clicks from Tableau Desktop and a few seconds of publishing through an average speed network, and the new visualizations are live!
• Seeing details on who has viewed the visualization and when. This is something particularly useful to me for trying to drive adoption of some new pages, so I really appreciate the granularity provided in Tableau Server

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

• While it took little time for our data analysts to crank out visualizations, it did take some time(longer than I expected) for our technology operations team to configure the server to share the sizes.
• The server update process is rather cumbersome -- requires a full uninstall/re-install.
• Again, while it took our data analysts next to no time to start creating, I've been in other organizations that have struggled with the feature-rich interface and complexity of the Tableau client. So, it requires the right personnel, with dedicated time, to fully leverage the tool.

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.

It simply is used all the time by more and more people. Migrating to something else would involve lots of work and lots of training. The renewal fee being fair, it simply isn't worth migrating to a different tool for now.

Incentivized

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

User experience is the most important factor to consider whenever considering capabilities for non-technical business users. If the learning curve is so steep business users must be advanced users to be productive, you hit the wall of diminishing returns, this is exceptionally true when it comes to analyzing data. Transforming data analysts into BI development experts shifts the focus of the analyst from analyzing data to mastering software. Tableau does a masterful job at minimizing the technology and maximizing the users understanding of their data.

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

Our instance of Tableau Server was hosted on premises (I believe all instances are) so if there were any outages it was normally due to scheduled maintenance on our end. If the Tableau server ever went down, a quick restart solved most issues

While there are definitely cases where a user can do things that will make a particular worksheet or dashboard run slowly, overall the performance is extremely fast. The user experience of exploratory analysis particularly shines, there's nothing out there with the polish of Tableau.

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

I think the folks that work in support are generally pretty good at what they do (when you get them on a WebEx). But the process of reporting issues to them and waiting for a response (via email only) is a hassle. I never understood why you can't just call them up and discuss the issues with them. It would take a handful of email exchanges before they would agree to a WebEx session. That was frustrating.

In our case, they hired a private third party consultant to train our dept. It was extremely boring and felt like it dragged on. Everything I learned was self taught so I was not really paying attention. But I do think that you can easily spend a week on the tool and go over every nook and cranny. We only had the consultant in for a day or two.

The sales consultants do an amazing job of introducing the tool and its capabilities. They are also helpful in explaining the layout of the desktop client and its different functionality. Keep in mind that they use a sample data source (MS Excel) with a very small amount of data to show off what it can do. What you have to remember is that you are buying the tool so that you can connect to large amounts of data (and possibly blend data together from different databases).

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.

Implementation was over the phone with the vendor, and did not go particularly well. Again, think this was our fault as our integration and IT oversight was poor, and we made errors. Would they have happened had a vendor been onsite? Not sure, probably not, but we probably wouldn't have paid for that either

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

Looker and Tableau are quite similar products. I think Tableau's ability to view data visually is more comprehensive. The different breakdowns in UTM level versus first touch and last touch are shown in a visual format, making it much easier to view and interpret the results. Tableau also has faster load times compared to Looker for larger datasets.

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.

• Tableau Server has had a huge positive impact. It has allowed us to quickly distribute complex dashboards across the company
• Tableau Server has allowed us to easily manage our entire employee base at the company and control the dashboards they view and interact with

Incentivized