Entrinsik Informer vs. Yurbi

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

The Yurbi Poduct is extremely well suited for organizations looking for a mature Business Intelligence and ad-hoc reporting tool. The strength of Yurbi is that it is highly customizable and can work in various environments.

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

• Yurbi allows us to build customized Dashboards for specific users. Once the initial Dashboard is created, the user themselves have permissions to customize the Dashboard to suit their needs. The flexibility is there for a wide set of users.
• Yurbi product is highly customizable. We looked for a Business Intelligence product for quite some time that could be customized to work with different types of data sets. When we started considering Yurbi, it was evident from the beginning that the product could be customized very quickly to work within our environment and our specific data types.
• The Yurbi product stays a step ahead with the changing market being focused more for the tablet and smart phone user population. As our customers first started to use iPADs and iPhones, it was great to see that an upgraded Yurbi product was readily available for use for the iPAD/iPhone set of users.

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 the Yurbi Developer tool is highly mature, there have been cases where building specific complex reports within Yurbi required extensive support directly from the vendor (and even some Yurbi product customizations). It would be great if the Yurbi Developer tool could be slightly refreshed to make it easier for more non-technical users to build more complex reports within Yurbi.
• Over years of usage of the Yurbi product with growing set of available reports to run for users, it's easy to get unorganized in terms of being able to find the correct report to run. It's highly adviseable if future releases of Yurbi began offering features to organize all reports a little better within the product (including an audit trail of reports that users typically run to make it easier for them to go back to the right reports).
• We heavily use the SMTP configuration within Yurbi to set up auto-email notifications to specific set of users with requested reports. At times, the SMTP service becomes unavailable and Yurbi product is unable to send these emails to the users. Besides not receiving the email, it's easily evident that the SMTP service connection failed. It would be great if future versions of the Yurbi product would alert the user of the failed SMTP connection on initial Yurbi login so the administrator becomes aware of the issue and can take action to resolve the problem.

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.

The Yurbi product has been perceived very well by our customers. They have continued to use it for years and the user population has only expanded. Customers love the flexibility and large set of Dashboards and reports that can be made available within the product quickly and efficiently.

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

The Yurbi product is incredibly easy to use and very intuitive for the user. The environment is highly customizable to the user's own preferences which is the best part.

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.

Yurbi was very simple to implement and the software prerequisites and server requirements were very basic.

Incentivized

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

Yurbi was overall a better product, highly customizable, more user friendly, and lower priced.

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.