Windward Core Information Reviews & Insights

Score9.1 out of 10

31 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

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

Pros

Intuitive and User-Friendly Interface: Users have consistently praised the intuitive and user-friendly interface of Windward Reports, mentioning that they find it easy to navigate and manipulate tables using drag and drop functionality. Many users appreciate the simplicity of the interface, which allows them to quickly create and complete tasks efficiently.

Responsive Support Team: Users highly appreciate the responsiveness of Windward's support team. They mention that their questions and concerns are addressed promptly and professionally, leading to a positive experience. The support team provides quick assistance whenever needed.

Seamless Integration with Microsoft Office: Users highlight the major advantage of Windward Reports being seamlessly integrated within the Microsoft Office suite. They appreciate being able to leverage familiar features from Office products, such as Word, to easily create visually appealing reports. This integration enables users to work efficiently without requiring extensive technical knowledge or additional software.

Windward Core Reviews

9 Reviews

InformationComputer Software8Internet1

Great Solution for Word and Excel Users

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

February 27, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Windward Studios was being used to create custom reporting for SaaS administrators clients. Both our administrators and our clients have different reporting needs and Windward allows each user to create and modify their own report templates based on their specific requirements. Windward reduces the time required for custom report creation and modification.

Pros

Windward handles multiple reporting template formats using tools people are already familiar with. Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel are particularly useful for us.
Windward has great technical support. Questions and issues are always answered in a timely manner.
Windward has multiple pricing options which were helpful for us in getting started.

Cons

I would like to see more organized and up to date documentation and videos for setup and training.
It depends on your particular setup and requirements, but our particular setup required a separate Windows server to run the Restful Engine. A cloud-based web-service that Windward maintains would be preferred.
While Windward's Microsoft based tools are great, they can be a bit intimidating to non-programmers at first glance.

Likelihood to Recommend

Great for Technical Users. It's great for people a bit more on the technical side. It allows developers to quickly create and modify reporting templates without having to modify source code or make updates to a repository.

Potentially Difficult for Non-Technical Users. Making substantial changes to the data portions of reporting can be a bit difficult for non-technical users. While Windward's tools for this are great, it still requires an understanding of the database schema which not all users will have.

Verified User

Executive in Engineering (Internet company, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Windward Studios Rocks

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

February 7, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have selected Windward Studios as our replacement for Oracle Reports. Finding a product that allowed users to easily change their own text and graphics content on correspondence was the main focus. With Windward Studios, users can use Microsoft Word to integrate their report templates with our database application to generate high-quality documents. With very high volume printing requirements, speed was also a critical factor. Windward Studios easily met our expectations. We are very pleased with this product.

Pros

Easily integrates MS Word templates with database tables or views.
Generates high-quality output at great speeds.
Produces output in several formats for a variety of uses.

Cons

We had difficulty loading the jar file for the Java engine in our Oracle database. Calling reports using the command line worked fine.

Likelihood to Recommend

Windward Studios is perfect for maintaining letter or statement templates. It's easy for users to do this themselves, saving development time and costs. Generating tabular reports is probably better using other tools. We use Oracle Application Express as our development tool, and it does a better job for that.

Randy McLachlan

President in Product Management at Municipal Data Services Inc (Computer Software, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

Document Generation made easy!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

February 1, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have embedded Windward Studios in our Loan Automation Solution and provided a document and report generation module with ease. Given that the design is totally done in MS Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint), we prepared the templates for 40+ legal agreements and 20+ reports within weeks with minimal coding.

Pros

Design documents and reports with MS Office (WORD, EXCEL, POWERPOINT). This can be done by the business and not only be the IT. Template maintenance, which is usually mostly on content, can be done solely by business users.
Insert tags and business logic within documents to show/hide paragraphs depending on data or user input.
Integrates easily with 3rd party applications and it can also be used as the document and report generation engine of your software solution.
It can pull data from multiple sources (SQL, XML, OData, etc).

Cons

Better and more updated documentation. There is a wealth of functionality and the knowledge base does not reveal this much. You must be very specific in what you are looking for.
Web service consumption besides OData to pull data from other systems directly into the template would have taken Windward to another level.
User support in European timezones. :-)

Likelihood to Recommend

Windward Studios is best suited for document and report generation. Where the design of output is required, Windward Studios is a must.

Windward Studios is less suited where lots of input fields are required, such as for electronic forms. Windward is not a UI platform for data capturing. It is for presenting data.

Constantinos Tsiartas, CIMP

Founder and Managing Director in Information Technology at Jenus Technologies Limited (Computer Software, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

4 years of experience

View profile

Get the same as the traditional, but much better!

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

April 13, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Windward Java Reporting Engine is a wonderful tool for reporting for Java applications. Currently I use it for the rapid elaboration of reports with special requirements, which allows to have a formidably fast engine to elaborate all type of reports without the wastage of time that involves the elaboration of reports in other engines more generalized in Java.

Pros

Fast and direct report engine, using friendly templates through an add-in for Microsoft Word.
Adequate support and documentation to ensure a quick integration
Your template designers dont need to learn Java at all. They can work through Microsoft Office

Cons

The learning curve can be a nuisance, considering that currently Jaspers is the antonomic engine for Java
There is a price (not so expensive) so yeah thats always a cons.
Many customers currently use Jaspers, so migration can become a point to consider

Likelihood to Recommend

If the project is currently new and has no business interfaces to deal with other systems areas, developing at WindWard can greatly ease development costs. On the other hand, where a culture of using other reporting tools already exists, change would probably not be the viable option for me and my people.

Miguel Angel Merino Vega

Analista de Sistemas in Information Technology at Consultor independiente de software (Computer Software, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

View profile

Java Reporting Engine Review from Java Developer

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

March 30, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Java Reporting Engine to capture and process data we receive from USD. The we return the data using a HTML format which is easy to view for analyst to judge the input data. This data is then integrated into our process to create our final product.

Pros

Flexibility. The ability to modify the reporting engine to what you are exactly looking for and what you expect back.
Speed. Extremely quick page generation.
Overall it leave a very small footprint and does not burden too much on our system.

Cons

I found the API documentation to be rather lacking and descriptive.
Initial setup can be a little more complication due to the above confusing documentation.

Likelihood to Recommend

For us it is well suited to retrieve data from our sql database [to] create a report of the data type, information, and attributes, format this report and then send it over to an Analyst who can go over the exact change that has taken place when a new batch of USD has come in.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Computer Software company, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

For native Office output, AutoTag really delivers

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

January 7, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use AutoTag designer to build reports for our customers to use internally and with their own customers. It is one of several report design tools currently in use, and we selected AutoTag specifically for its native Microsoft Office output for which there simply is no comparison against our other tools, which technically create Office-type output (RTF, DOCX, etc.) but not in formats that are easy for our customers to adapt and modify after the reports are generated. AutoTag output behaves exactly like Office documents because they are Office documents. Certainly this isn't the answer for every reporting scenario, but when native Office output is required, AutoTag delivers exactly that.

Pros

Native Office output -- not nested tables and/or horrible RTF like other tools generate.
Ease of use -- once the data sources are set up, creating tables is as simple as drag and drop (okay, maybe not exactly that simple, but you can certainly create a table of data using drag and drop, then format it and manipulate it as needed).
Responsive developers and support -- when I've had questions, they've been addressed VERY quickly and professionally.

Cons

Limited in terms of customizability -- this is a double-edged sword. Other report tools we use support anything from limited to incredibly complex JavaScript, for example, and we often use a combination of JavaScript and complex queries to pass and manipulate data. AutoTag can do some of this, but it wouldn't be our go-to solution for complex reporting.
Limited drag and drop -- while you can easily create tables with drag and drop, you can't drag and drop individual fields, which really isn't intuitive

Likelihood to Recommend

AutoTag is a brilliant solution for less complex reports where native Microsoft Office output is required. This is where AutoTag really shines. It's also appropriate in situations where our customers want to develop and maintain their own reports but don't necessarily want to commit an experienced data person or report developer to do the work. For complex report requirements that need JavaScript or considerable data manipulation inside the report templates, we will continue to look at other tools in our kit.

Brent Rossow

Business Data Analyst in Information Technology at FPX, LLC (Computer Software, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

AutoTag Template Designer Review

Rating: 5 out of 10

Incentivized

September 23, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

AutoTag Template Designer is used across multiple departments in my organization. Our development team uses it to build and fix templates, and our product support team uses it for basic troubleshooting when clients are experiencing issues, or are looking for basic enhancements.

Pros

Using Microsoft Office capabilities to format templates.
Integrating SQL queries into a template.
Tagging specific datapoints to display from a SQL query.
Conditional formatting.

Cons

Sometimes using foreach tags can be confusing.

Likelihood to Recommend

AutoTag Template Designer is well suited to create a template that uses basic concepts (clear locations to insert tags). It is a little more complicated to use if needed for more complex situations that include more logic than just inserting x data point to this tag.

Adam Murray

Product Support Analyst in Customer Service at geoAMPS (Computer Software, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

This is the one!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

September 23, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The AutoTag Template Designer is used between multiple departments, including the development, quality assurance, and support team. This allows anyone involved in the template process to be able to see exactly what is being added into any report at any time, without having to consult with another department and take away from their work.

Pros

Lets you easily pull in data points
Allows you to validate a query before saving it to make sure that it works correctly
Easy export to most common formats so you can test out your template with real-world data

Cons

When dealing with large queries, the system tends to slow down.
Nested for each queries have issues validating

Likelihood to Recommend

As long as the user has at least a small background in using any kind of SQL commands, this should be near effortless for them. Windward's support page on their website has an immense amount of knowledge available for free, and has saved me from pulling my hair out several times.

Gregory Bosko

Product Support Analyst in Customer Service at geoAMPS (Computer Software, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

User of Autotag Template Designer

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

September 18, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Autotag Template Designer is being used across the entire company and by several departments that specialize in reporting. It's being used as a tool to create templates that run in conjunction with the software out company has created. It allows our company to [access] extra data being stored in our software and generate it into specific documents that our clients need.

Pros

The set up of the product is fairly easy as long as you have the right version and license key. It's also fairly easy to transfer licenses between users.
Once you have the main queries down, the tagging of the template is fairly easy and you can reuse templates instead of starting from scratch each time.
If you are having issues with a template or a tag type- the help documentation provided is helpful to provide examples. The webinars are also a good stepping stone to get knowledge quickly.

Cons

Sometimes the formatting within the Microsoft Word documents can be tricky. That's where most of the time comes from is making sure the tags don't mess up the formatting of the actual template itself.
Error messages can be vague. For example if something is wrong with the query or a tag, it can be difficult to find the issue within the query or identify the offending tag easily. This means the whole template won't work because of one minor issue.

Likelihood to Recommend

If the end users are going to be proficient in SQL, then they are already light years ahead. Most of the time learning the product comes from figuring out the queries. After that, tags are fairly easy! It's great for clients that don't know SQL too that will just need the initial template built and will update the wording or static text.

Jenelle Cooper

Product Support Lead in Information Technology at geoAMPS (Computer Software, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

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For native Office output, AutoTag really delivers

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

January 7, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Native Office output -- not nested tables and/or horrible RTF like other tools generate.
Ease of use -- once the data sources are set up, creating tables is as simple as drag and drop (okay, maybe not exactly that simple, but you can certainly create a table of data using drag and drop, then format it and manipulate it as needed).
Responsive developers and support -- when I've had questions, they've been addressed VERY quickly and professionally.

Cons

Limited in terms of customizability -- this is a double-edged sword. Other report tools we use support anything from limited to incredibly complex JavaScript, for example, and we often use a combination of JavaScript and complex queries to pass and manipulate data. AutoTag can do some of this, but it wouldn't be our go-to solution for complex reporting.
Limited drag and drop -- while you can easily create tables with drag and drop, you can't drag and drop individual fields, which really isn't intuitive

Likelihood to Recommend

Brent Rossow

Business Data Analyst in Information Technology at FPX, LLC (Computer Software, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile