"A new report’s template creation is very often manipulation of a user’s layout of a report. A report can be ready in a day or less, once stored procedures are created as per sections in the report."
"To generate these same tabular formatted reports with a code-only solution would have taken a lot longer to implement than the Docmosis template-based approach. Docmosis templates were easier to design as we were able to use Microsoft Word to create them. The templates made it easy to make any changes to reports and provided flexibility in our design approach."
"Globally, the ability to create document templates in several formats by using a rich syntax is simple and clear to understand."
"Since our initial development, this feature has required very little maintenance. And when changes are requested, it is rather easy to change a Word document template and new staff can be quickly trained to modify a report."
"There is flexibility in laying out tables that is akin to UI front-end design."
"The ability to embed, and dynamically repeat, templates within each other is a very simple yet extremely powerful tool."
"Windward helped automate reports which otherwise would have needed IT to create and maintain."
"The most valuable feature is the Rich Text or TinyMCE in fields. For example, you have a text field but it is not a regular text field, it is a link. Inside this link, you can copy/paste everything: images, text, and tables together. After saving this field, you can pull it into the document."
"The integration with MS Office is an advantage, creating a better user experience."
"The two features that I like the best are the ability to generate Word and Excel documents, and the ability to create my templates directly inside those software sets. It's absolutely critical for me as a user to have design and layout control, because all of my reports are very, very customized. I have to have control over the ability to generate and to control what they look like."
"It's very feature-rich. You can create tables, you can create graphs, you can import pictures, and those features are also easy to use."
"Thanks to Windward, our documents need very few tweaks and are usually "customer-ready" right out of the box."
"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."
"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."
"Version control and restricted access to some users for template editing could be a useful addition."
"It would be great to have improved diagnostic and debugging tools. When report templates are complex, sometimes any minor modification needs to be thoroughly tested to ensure that it does not disrupt a previously designed template."
"We are facing new challenges such as internationalization. The next big challenge will be to offer even more date formats and numbers that cover the majority of countries. It will be to also think about features, such as number to text conversion, or the reverse which is currently only available in English but is in great demand by our international customers."
"The challenge in usage when we developed the reports four years ago was the limited logic that can be applied to manipulate and display data. That functionality was largely transferred over to the database layer in creating the data output that was to be displayed."
"They're not a gigantic company, so they just don't have all the capital to do whatever they would want to do. That's the only reason I would hold back even that one point. I know that if I do ask for something, I'll get it. I just know that it will take some time."
"It would be nice to have a black-and-white, ideal setup for servers, to maximize capabilities. We went through a lot of scenarios to get something that is scalable. An ideal AWS-package server setup could have saved us a lot of time. But I understand this is very company specific."
"It is software, so there are always times where things don't work. Most of the time issues happen when trying to move to a new version. There might be problems with reports that were created in an older version, so either we have to make a tweak to the templates or we report it to them and get them to make an adjustment to their software."
"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."
"Regarding AutoTag, we do notice that when you want to refactor a little bit of your template design or when you want to implement changes, sometimes you need a lot of clicks to get the change done. For instance... it would be helpful to be able to find all the identifiers with the old name and replace them with the new name. We haven't found a way to do that with the find-replace tool. Throughout the user-interface of Windward, you need a lot of clicks to get that done."
"One thing that frustrated us a little bit is that we have to use the Office PDF generation, because the native PDF generation is always slightly different compared to the one in Office. The formatting is just a little bit off here and there... This means that we need to have Office installed on the server to be able to generate these documents via API."
"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."
"The reason it took us so long to get the system up and running is that the APIs could be improved a bit. It could be a little bit more interoperable with software, without having to do a lot of the heavy lifting that we had do to get it in."
Docmosis is ranked 2nd in Document Generation Tools while Windward Core is ranked 1st in Document Generation Tools. Docmosis is rated 9.0, while Windward Core is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Docmosis writes "Easy to integrate this solution into an existing system". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Windward Core writes "It has streamlined a lot of our reporting processes". Docmosis is most compared with , whereas Windward Core is most compared with SAP Crystal Reports, Nintex Document Generation, OpenText Magellan BI & Reporting, CA Easytrieve Report Generator and Templafy.
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