It's a very interesting solution, and you have to have some knowledge on the Board before using it because it's not an easy tool to learn. For users that do not have experience with the BI or Power BI or some similar tools can find Board a bit complicated.

It's a good tool. It's a powerful tool, easy to use and deploy, but it needs some improvement.

I rate it seven out of ten.

We use Board for just the integration with Business Central. We do not use the drag-and-drop interface. We do not use it for predictive analytics. We are not growing now. We have stable full-time employees. Our turnover is stable. People evaluating the product must know what they must have for their analytic needs. A specialist can create the report. 

The most important thing is to know what we want, which forms, which reports, and what they should look like. We must have a good accounting system. Everything should be done properly to get the correct report. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

I would rate Board a nine out of ten. In general, it is a surprisingly good tool.

I would say the best is yet to come. Based on all the new, upcoming releases, features, and eLearning. If you are looking to make a decision, you should defer from making a decision right now, because the best is yet to come.

I would rate BOARD as an eight out of 10. The things that really could be improved would be a couple of things. 

I think the print issue is big, and then the ability to have that back support. It feels like BOARD as an organization has grown exponentially and probably isn't in the right space for support and training. Once that application is launched, to be able to say, "Okay. How are you going to support this moving forward?" Because not everybody is prepared to get in there and create Cubes. I'm not a Cube-creator, but I don't want to pay someone large sums of money to get in there and make adjustments, and that kind of thing. 

And maybe having some out-of-the-box, off-the-shelf things like, "Here's an application and this is what it does," and then you can grab onto those.

Do your homework. Talk to other customers, and really do a benefit analysis, like what are you looking for? For us, again, we weren't looking for an ERP system or anything like that. We were looking for very customized, specific solution. Anybody looking for that, they really do need to do their homework. Create a steering committee from your organization to get everybody's perspective.

It is refreshing to use a tool that makes things easier, and works as expected.

Reach out to a sales person and watch a demo, because only when you see someone working with it will you appreciate the simplicity.

I rate the solution a seven out of ten and recommend it to users considering it. The solution is good, but the stability can be improved, and more sparsity videos can be included in Board education academic tools to aid learning and better understand how to work out calculations.

With Board I have learned how to deal with the master data and how to think about workflow, dataflow. and the structure of the cube.

Go with the latest version. Even my customers should have done so. If you're a new customer going with Board, go with the latest cloud version, always. The latest version is always best and it will solve most of the issues.

If our customers are happy, we are happy. If Board is making things simpler for our users, we'll be getting more licenses and we can suggest that users use more features of Board. It is making life and their work simpler. That is very good and that is the main objective for us.

I have been totally thrilled with BOARD. 

Just do it. I think about the way that BOARD is trying to continuously reinvent itself. Adding the community is huge. It gives us a source out of Google to find solutions. We are so used to that in our society. BOARD has actually done that. The customer service is huge, knowing that every time I make a new inquiry that I always feel like I am the number one customer, even though I know I am not. It has been huge; it has been fantastic. 

There is a tremendous learning curve with it, because you are learning a whole new language at first. Once you understand the basic concepts of what a capsule, mask, and entity are, then it becomes pretty easy. Then, like with anything else, the more you use it, the easier it gets. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: The all-in-one solution was key thing for us. I did not want have the end users go day-to-day having to use multiple apps to manage one task. I did not want to do that. I wanted to have "one" solution to fit all of our financial means. 

My purpose is telling them what they need and writing the initial SQL and building the capsule. Once I do that, I'm done, and then they just go off. I'm not a day-to-day user.

In terms of advice to a colleague who is looking at a similar solution, I don't know what their actual needs are, but my advice would be to go forward with this product. Don't be afraid to get some initial training, because they didn't want to supply that for us initially. My advice would be to get the initial training.

When it comes to selecting a vendor, what's important is a big community, support systems. I feel communication is very important, whether it's an email or something else. Within a couple of hours, if somebody responds, that is helpful, if they can provide a quick solution. It pacifies the people on the other side, because we are dealing with a lot of users at one time.

I think BOARD is a very good tool. I have worked with different BI tools like Tableau and Cognos. I think BOARD is not a very heavy software. It's a very light software compared to others; it doesn't just crash sometimes. And given the cost and effectiveness, everything which comes into play for the organization, I think BOARD fits the bill.

It is definitely good. Depending on your data, and what kind of business you are doing, I think investing in BOARD is a good, viable solution, because it's very user-friendly, and once you get the hang of it you can do wonders. I've been able to accomplish that next thing, I figured it out without notes. If I had received a tutorial I don't know what I would have done. I would encourage people to get into it. I find that Tableau is good software too, but it can be confusing. It's nice software, but I would say BOARD is much more user friendly.

It is important to have a clear strategy in the beginning of what you want to achieve. Make sure that you allocate the resources, then work with BOARD to ensure you have a successful launch.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• It has to be a reliable platform from a technical perspective. 
• It has to have good network support, customer service, and also have a reasonable price within our budget.

Make sure you know what you want before you start having someone work on building and designing something. A lot of times in the past (for us), people had what they thought was an idea of what they wanted, we would do all this work, then they would look at it and say, "No, that's not what we want." Then, we would have to start from scratch again. Definitely spend the time upfront to map everything out. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Availability
• Good communication
• Good technical knowledge, but also being able to speak to non-technical people. 

Technical support is definitely a 10 out of 10. The system solution is about a nine out of 10, and the only reason why I would give it a nine and not a 10, is that it still takes IT folks to really support it. It's not totally able to be supported within Finance. Given the amount of resources that a government has, we have a very small IT staff, and the departments are more relied upon to do their own IT. That's the only reason why I would give it a nine.

I like this solution because it's so versatile, you can really model it after your specific business practices. It's not the case that you might have to change your business practices to fit into it.

Try to use all the out-of-the-box functionality. Try to use BOARD for what it is good at doing and do not tread outside its capabilities, because then you start running into issues, such as writing procedures. When possible, do not write procedures. Procedures are necessary, but we are backing away from writing them. We are trying to use BOARD out-of-the-box.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: The consultants have always been helpful. They make sure that we are successful. I appreciate that.

It's got that combination of everything. I'm a business person predominantly, so I don't like having technical solutions. And it's something even I - and I'm not a consultant - can  deploy. I like that about it.

I'd still recommend that you need an experienced practitioner to take you through a well-designed solution. It's not about the technology, I think it's about the experience that people bring to designing a solution: building the data architecture, integration; leveraging their smarts. At least the first time, work with a partner.

We have been very happy with what we have seen. We are pretty new to this. We have done three implementations so far. BOARD has been performing well and is very efficient, though we have to improve the implementation time on our end.

I would personally advise looking into BOARD (depending on your needs).

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

1. Product
2. Relationship with our clients/partners.

If we do not have a sustainable working relationship, then we can't move forward, even if the product is outstanding.

I would tell colleagues to give this a good look. The setup may be a little bit more time-consuming, and understanding how everything works together. But longer term, it will probably save in the end. I don't have to be looking for other bolt-ons, it covers everything. So I would say that's probably the best advice. You may need more than one other solution, where with this, I think it will cover all your bases.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: A commitment to the product as well as the willingness to help support the product.

If you want to streamline your business and reduce hourly time using the creation of spreadsheets or other financial reports that they should go for BOARD because it drastically reduces time. It will also make your financials ready and available for any type of financial planning or reporting. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We needed somebody who would understand what we wanted and the output that we needed. 

I think that from talking with other customers here at the BOARDVille 2018 user conference, your consultant, if you're using a BOARD consultant, I think that that person is very important. Also, just allow ample time, because it is a sandbox, the startup time is going to be more considerable than out-of-the-box solutions.

I would tell a colleague the same thing we're experiencing. BOARD is very powerful, flexible, but it takes an initial learning curve.

I think the most important criterion when selecting is support. Once you create your relationship and implement, I think it's important to keep that relationship going.

I would give the solution an eight out of 10, because I think with BOARD 11 they're getting up to speed with a lot of the usability, the knowing how to use it without being taught how to use, making it more intuitive. But the reason I would say an eight and not a 10 is because - I do have a little bit of coding background - while it's nice that it's a user-interface development, could we speed it up if we could use code to actually develop faster, for people who would like that option?

My advice would be, know what you want before you purchase anything.

Before you implement. look at what you want to achieve before you start working on building a database, then starting an implementation. Make decisions on what you want to do for your company.

Looking at BOARD 11, it looks impressive. I like the new design, user interface, and everything is on the cloud.

What do you appreciate most in a vendor?

• All the different, little plugins that they have for Outlook, Excel, and PowerPoint. It makes it very easy to use.
• The cloud and desktop client are very easy to use. 
• At first, the product was not very intuitive, but now if you get it, it is customizable.

When selecting a vendor, in general, the most important factors are their

• being responsive
• being truthful.

If I have an issue, I don't care if they say, "We cannot fix it," or, "We'll fix it in a later version." Communicate that.

My advice would be, you should seriously consider this solution.

I hope to improve BOARD in all business areas.