OpenText Magellan Reviews & Insights

Score9 out of 10

22 Reviews and Ratings

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.

OpenText Magellan Reviews

4 Reviews

Engineering

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 (Computer Software company, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

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

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 (Public Relations and Communications, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

3 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 (Information Services, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years 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 (Computer Software, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

9 years of experience

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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

January 25, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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

Christopher Noyes

Director Advertising Technology in Engineering at Crisp Media (Public Relations and Communications, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience