We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos and Windward Core based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in Reporting."Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Cognos is security. The solution has updated features that other competitors' solutions come out with long after IBM Cognos has had them."
"Mapbox integration for geospatial analytics down to longitude/latitude layers."
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"We are able to generate quality reports easily which allows us to decrease response time."
"The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report."
"The comprehensiveness or broadness of the software functions or business intelligence functions that it provides is valuable. It is also quite easy to use and user-friendly."
"Comparing IBM Cognos to other applications, once a person is trained on it or they have developed a skill set to operate the application, it is best in its category."
"From an integration perspective, they provide the code for you to easily integrate with existing applications."
"The solution is very flexible, so you can create anything you want. Think of the possibilities you have in Excel or in Word, because these are the two document generators that are used the most. I only use Word, but I can use nearly every feature in Word, including making charts and tables, and produce those features in Windward, parametrically."
"The most valuable feature is that it provides good, dynamic document-generation performance and the documents are being generated reliably."
"The ability for users to have design and layout control is also critically important. Without this ability, procuring report designs would represent a huge bottleneck. Report design tools also enable upsell opportunities for customized reports, with quick turnaround times."
"One of the things they added in the last two or three years is PODs, Portable Object Doclets. One of our clients said they wanted to use PODs. They're a good way to make some constructs modular and keep things in one place."
"We can develop any report at least five times faster."
"Technical support is very good. They reply immediately and follow-up with any questions."
"For the designer we use AutoTag which is a Microsoft Word plugin. In general, it's easy to use, it doesn't have a very steep learning curve. It's not difficult, for people who know Microsoft Office well, to start using the AutoTag tool... It feels just like you're in a Microsoft Office environment with some extra functionality."
"Extending dynamic cubes aggregate awareness with calculated measures."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."
"I would like for the platform to become more standard. If we make a development on our report and our dashboard, it will not be used in another solution. That means there is no portability for the developers."
"It could have more options for themes."
"We would like to see development of the product's UI function, to make it more of a UI tool that can be configured as required."
"They were lacking in the initial phases of development in the area of big data, and they still need to improve that aspect of the product."
"I would like to see is more easy building, movement in the reports, and dashboard functionality within reporting. Overall more simple elements within reports. If the elements are simple then you don't have to render a full page, but you can move separate parts in the page."
"It needs better support for upgrades and more control over layout of elements. Upgrades tend to break existing output. Elements do not position where expected due to insertion of blank lines and page breaks. It takes time to fix these through trial and error."
"The tool does not support macOS documents."
"A lot of clients who want to use this don't have the technical background for the SQL portion of gathering the data. If Windward were to make a more user-friendly SQL extract front-end, that would help a lot of clients to leverage the application a lot more."
"There is always room for improvement in the speed, especially with the complex, multi-line Excel spreadsheets. They made some improvements in the last version that are quantum-fold faster than when I first started. But there is always room for improvement there. You always want reports faster and faster."
"About six months ago, we raised the possibility of improving the way they manage the HTML 5. Sometimes, when you insert a lot of data in the data source, you get an error because it is not managing HTML 5 features well. I believe they have addressed this in later versions of their product."
"I'm still working in Office 2016, and we have had some issues, but Windward is very quick to react when there is a problem. We are also going to switch over to Office 365 and that will solve a few of the problems."
"There are some Excel formatting things that you lose when you implement a template: some default Excel validation scripts, macros. You could create them in Excel if you were just using Excel, but in creating a template that generates a report, some of those validation things are lost."
"They should add a document distribution solution on top of the document generation capability. It should allow us to send the generated document to a certain recipient (e.g. customer contact’s email address) based on a business-rules management system. That system would allow the end-user to manage a relationship between a document template and its recipient."
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IBM Cognos is ranked 4th in Reporting with 129 reviews while Windward Core is ranked 24th in Reporting. IBM Cognos is rated 8.0, while Windward Core is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of IBM Cognos writes "Improved the quality of our KPIs, while reducing calls to the IT department". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Windward Core writes "It has streamlined a lot of our reporting processes". IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, Oracle OBIEE, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and Oracle Hyperion, whereas Windward Core is most compared with Docmosis, SAP Crystal Reports, Nintex Document Generation, CA Easytrieve Report Generator and Templafy.
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