OpenText Magellan Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 9 out of 10

Score

9 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for OpenText Magellan are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Business Problems Solved

Actuate's open source BIRT has become an indispensable tool for many organizations, providing them with an integrated reporting solution that empowers better decision-making through data exporting and visualization of client project portfolios. Users have praised Actuate for its ability to deliver customizable reports, with features like sorting, aggregation, font changes, and hide/show options, making it an embedded part of several applications. This flexibility allows users to tailor reports to meet their specific needs.

IBM Maximo users have found Actuate to be a crucial component of their reporting ecosystem, serving as the primary reporting tool and paper work order generation mechanism. Its integration with Maximo enables seamless maintenance and indirect procurement functions. Additionally, Actuate's capabilities in understanding extracts from current systems make it invaluable for IT internal use and data extractions.

Actuate's software extends its use beyond traditional reporting tasks to include text mining and analysis of unstructured data from various sources such as social media analytics, call center data, and reviews. Users appreciate how Actuate simplifies sentiment analysis and text segmentation, reducing reliance on coding and Python or R text libraries.

Another key use case for Actuate lies in its role as the standardized reporting platform for seamless integration of custom schedule and ad hoc reporting into internally built applications. This ensures access to data from the core repository and provides users with a consistent experience across different applications.

Overall, Actuate's open source BIRT has proven to be a versatile tool that addresses various reporting challenges faced by organizations. Its ability to customize reports, integrate with existing systems, analyze unstructured data, and simplify reporting processes makes it a valuable asset for businesses across different industries.

Reviews

11 Reviews

An Excellent Tool for Text Analytics

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

March 10, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

There are multiple business problems you get from your clients where you need to study a lot of unstructured data. It could be ranging from social media analytics or call centre data or any review data. Text mining is the process of deriving high-quality information from text. This software is much intuitive and easy to use. Text mining goes beyond simply searching for keywords. It uses powerful algorithms to analyse that content, determine what a given piece of text is about and assess its relevance. We have use cases of this software in helping multiple industries' clients pre-dominantly in Retail and CPG. Sentiment analysis and text segmentation are key project types that we use this software for. Generally, we used to have Python and R text libraries to solve these issues but this software simplifies the process and reduces the requirement of coding.

Pros

Sentiment analysis for one of the gaming client
Text segmentation for social media analysis
Summary creation from multi page documents

Cons

Image processing and understanding
Video analytics, there is a huge scope there
Manual intervention or scope of customization

Likelihood to Recommend

For any analysis related to text, it is quite useful. For any image and video-related unstructured, there is a huge room for improvement. Sentiment analysis is much widely used across the industries nowadays to understand the depth of any text; there is so much unstructured data available with companies. A lot can be interpreted from them, tools like these are a great way to start analysing that data.

Verified User

Analyst in Engineering (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

OpenText Magellan is very powerful for custom reporting

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

July 3, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

OpenText Magellan is being used to fulfill specific reporting requirements across the whole company. The reports are served to users through links or being embedded within custom solutions. OpenText Magellan allows us to provide reporting capabilities to our custom solutions. The ability to generate complex reports even allowed us to replace some screens in our solutions with Magellan reports. Users don't really know they are accessing a different solution for their reports, which makes up for very smooth user experience.

Pros

Ability to connect to different kinds of sources, including web services, and customize those queries to the extend needed
Provide tools to customize the look & feel of the reports as much as needed, even being able to choose different appearances for different outputs
Allowing scripting in the reports extends the functionality available
Allowing to embed reports without further licensing and maintaining all the functionality

Cons

The documentation on all the available features, but most importantly on the scripting side, can be improved
The standard look & feel of some basic options, like parameter selection or sorting and filtering, looks dated and can't be customized
The server portal needs to provide better tools
More integration is needed with other OpenText products

Likelihood to Recommend

OpenText Magellan is very good for very complex reporting where the user just needs to see the final output but doesn't require much interaction with the report itself. It is also very good at exporting to different types of outputs. OpenText Magellan doesn't seem that easy to use when you need to interact with data (mainly if you don't have IT skills).

Martin Rubens

IT solutions Manager in Information Technology at APP Corporation Pty Ltd (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

View profile

If you have the budget for it it can do great things, if you are a small company run, don't walk away.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

January 25, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using it to present reports to customers and to our executives for our rich media advertising business. Our entire business uses this as a reporting platform. We had internally developed reporting, that worked well, but was hard to support and extend and expensive to maintain. We also wanted to embed it in another application to include customer facing reporting in the platform they use.

Pros

In terms of extensibility this is the best reporting platform we have seen. You can build very sophisticated reports with different data sources, and extend the basic functionality with javscript code
Securing the BI system is also a strength and the system can be configured relatively easily.
Reports can be available on mobile devices
Good Javascript embedding framework does not require the site to be built in java

Cons

We have found a ton of bugs in there, our implementation is very complex and we use a lot of features, but we wish there were less bugs. Particularly with parameter display and validation.
Actuate has decided not to continue to support the birtondemand platform and it is running on older versions of their main platform.
Building out security extensibility is rather complex.
They have not had a rest interface until new versions of iHub.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you do not have a large budget and are a large organization, I would steer clear of Actuate. If you are looking to do very complex washboarding, I would not use them. Your developers have to be very skilled to work with this. Plan to bring in consultants if necessary to help your process. Adhoc reporting is weak. If your pricing is user based and you expand, this could be very expensive.

Christopher Noyes

Director Advertising Technology in Engineering at Crisp Media (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Former System Admin for Scorecard Module

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

October 14, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Actuate is being used by selected user groups across the entire organization. It allows us to bring in data from multiple sources and evaluate performance under consolidated locations and measures.

Pros

Easy data import
Multiple levels of user security

Cons

Limited report writing ability unless you implant the iServer applications
End users have little or no control over data displays

Likelihood to Recommend

Scorecard without the Birt360 module is very limited in reporting and data displays. End users who are not computer savvy would have a difficult time using the advanced features.

Lynn Kutz

Quality/Performance Improvement Consultant in Quality Assurance at Good Samaritan Society (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

Actuate BIRT - open source that's worth a look

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

October 13, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Actuate's open source BIRT is used as an integrated reporting solution to provide data exporting and visualization of client project portfolios that empowers them with information to aid in better decisions.

Pros

The report outputs can vary across different types such as HTML, PDF, and Excel
Their open source offering is very sufficient
There are great boards and blogs for developers and engineers to expand and use their features.
The people from the company that I've worked with are professional and courteous.

Cons

The report designer can be unstable at times.
The reporting engine tends to have memory leaks with certain types of massive-data reporting.
The report graphics don't have the sexiest appeal (e.g. Glossy feel, animated output)
Some extensibility is extremely difficult to get to without purchasing a license (e.g. Setting a simple flag so that HTML outputs in compressed mode requires either creating your own emitter or going the paid route)

Likelihood to Recommend

It depends on extensibility, set-up, access & style. Actuate performs fairly well, but has performance issues because it sits on top of eclipse, which sits on top of Java. Extensibility usually comes at that price. Set-up is fairly straightforward and it can be secured.

Bri Gipson

Sr. Systems Engineer in Engineering at Métier (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

Actuate Review

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

October 6, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Actuate is being used to understand extracts from current systems. It is used for IT internally only. This tool is also being used for data extractions.

Pros

Flexibility of the product
Able to make applications do what they need
Fairly quick learning scale.

Cons

Organizing of the pieces could flow better.

Likelihood to Recommend

What can it do that is better than the rest?

Shawn Thomas

Sr Business Systems Analyst in Information Technology at Mckesson (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Developer Perspective on Actuate

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

September 19, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Actuate is an embedded part of several of our applications. It helps us deliver information content via reports to end users and it allows the user to customize the reports with many excel like features such as sorting, aggregation, font changes, hide/show, etc.

Pros

End user ability to customize Business Intelligence Reporting Tools (BIRT)
Actuate Support is usually prompt and helpful.
Ability to embed in other applications, has extendable code for authenticating/authorizing users.

Cons

Licensing is a bear.

Likelihood to Recommend

What is the licensing structure? How long does it take to get licenses? Can an OEM reseller of Actuate get one license for the entire development organization?

Amy Broome

Software Developer in Engineering at ACI Worldwide (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

9 years of experience

Acuate 8 before the birth of BIRT

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

September 17, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Actuate was being used with IBM Maximo to generate reports from our CMMS system. The reporting software served as our primary reporting tool and paper work order generation mechanism. Its availability and continuity were crucial to the maintenance and indirect procurement functions.

Pros

The software can be tied to Actuate Basic which is much like MS Visual Basic and can provide an almost custom application feel to some reports.
Actuate had field movement tools that allowed a user to line rows up and disperse them across a report based off the width. Comparative tools like Crystal did not provide these.
The Actuate Server also gave easy access to review who had been running a report or reports via its web interface.

Cons

The debug tool that came with the Actuate 8 developer was poorly written in my opinion; compiling a report could be very difficult when a number of functions were being called.
There wasn't any reporting that could be run to download Actuate utilization statistics. Analytics had to be done by manually reviewing who had been running reports.
At times when the Actuate Server would become overloaded the only solution was to restart it. There wasn't a way to clear up the list of pending report requests.

Likelihood to Recommend

Be sure to ask about pricing. If I remember correctly the pricing is by processor core, which can get VERY expensive in a large organization with multiple locations. I would say Actuate would be best suited for a medium/large sized organization with 1000-2500 employees with a dedicated team of software developers. If the organization needs someone who can get up and running quickly developing reports and where it is not the primary responsibility then I would recommend an alternative product like Crystal Reports.

Todd Bellamy

Systems Analyst in Information Technology at MATECH Solutions (Machining Technologies, Inc.) (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Actuate gets the job done!

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

September 11, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Actuate is the standardized reporting platform for seamless integration of custom schedule and ad hoc reporting into our internally built applications. Reports are made available across the firm in all lines of business and support services allowing access to data from our core repository. There are both dynamic (allowing the passing of parameters) and static reporting available.

Pros

We integrate page level security allowing a single report to service audiences of 20,000+ consumers but only deliveing the data in the vast data set applicable to the consumer.
Publish common components allowing the development staff to deliver consistent look and feel based on the standard firm style guide.
Reusable library objects allow for fast deployment of new application reports.

Cons

Report rendering can take a long time for large reports (250,000+ pages) - we run these in batch over night
The deployment of production code from development to test to production enviroments can be complex due to the number of components that must compile

Likelihood to Recommend

e.Report Designer Professional and the report output is suited to application embedded reports - but we also use the product to publish information for data analysts and finance deeper analysis.

Verified User

Strategist (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Actuate is the best tool

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

November 26, 2013

Pros

The performance of Actuate IServer is tremendous. It can handle a large volume of reports with many concurrent users.
We can do anything in Actuate. We can write our own function, procedures, methods in Actuate. Basically we can create our own framework in Actuate. No other reporting tool is proving this functionality.
It supports the OLTP system very well. The data can be flowed easily from one report to another report, by using array.
Control level formatting is available.

Cons

Support for more databases, such as other BI tools.
There can be more graph types.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are a techie and love to face challenges, then Actuate is the choice. You can do anything in Actuate. It has nice security features page level security.

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

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Acuate 8 before the birth of BIRT

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

September 17, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

The software can be tied to Actuate Basic which is much like MS Visual Basic and can provide an almost custom application feel to some reports.
Actuate had field movement tools that allowed a user to line rows up and disperse them across a report based off the width. Comparative tools like Crystal did not provide these.
The Actuate Server also gave easy access to review who had been running a report or reports via its web interface.

Cons

The debug tool that came with the Actuate 8 developer was poorly written in my opinion; compiling a report could be very difficult when a number of functions were being called.
There wasn't any reporting that could be run to download Actuate utilization statistics. Analytics had to be done by manually reviewing who had been running reports.
At times when the Actuate Server would become overloaded the only solution was to restart it. There wasn't a way to clear up the list of pending report requests.

Likelihood to Recommend

Todd Bellamy

Systems Analyst in Information Technology at MATECH Solutions (Machining Technologies, Inc.) (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience