Their latest release is called 9.0, and they added some new functions. This solution used to get awards on the level of documentation before they were bought out by TIBCO. Lately, though, they're releasing the product with major changes that are not documented at all. We've caught them on that. We'll ask technical support, "Where is this?" They'll say, "Oh, it's in the manual." We say, "No, it's not. The manual's wrong." Then they say, "Well, here's a screen print showing...Yeah, that's wrong," so we say, "You no longer do that. That doesn't work this way. How do we do it?" Their answer is, "We'll get back to you." I've been fighting with the company support for the last eight weeks to document something that is not currently documented. I know how to make it work, but no one else does because they haven't posted that. The product gets pushed out and the information is sent to documentation, and the documentation says, "Yeah, we'll get around to it when we get around to it." If there were to be any improvements right now, their documentation needs to get in sync with their product.

Documentation could definitely be improved.

The challenge lies not in what the tool can do but in how you use it and understand the data. The key isn't just the capabilities of the tool but how well it's used, the understanding of the data, and the relevance of the analysis to the situation at hand.

The service levels are remarkable. The products are great as well. Information Builders should create a way to create predictive models without having to be a statistician.  

We will be using the conversion process soon. I hope this will be an easy process converting from 7.6 to 8.02.

IBI has now added the data animation/visualization features mentioned above. This is a must for our company, and we and IBI believe they will revolutionize the BI space.

Here’s the thing …

Wouldn’t anyone agree that a data presentation that shows the relationship between factors in a moving/animated way would be more powerful/convincing than the typically static data presentations we have become accustomed to seeing/victimized by in all of those seemingly endless corporate performance meetings? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the results for an organization simply jumped off the page and it was relatively obvious what was going on/what needs to be done? The cool part is that this future functionality will be free from IBI as part of their regular BI solution offering!

IIt would be nice to have it easier to embed native sql. Release process in our set up is not the safest since it requires changing paths.

More access via end users without using reporting objects. Easy way to create charts and graphs for reporting to executive staff.

The solution can be improved by adding more automated options for reporting. I would like to see more user-friendly instructions for employees that only use the solution on a monthly basis.

If IBI can make each release of WebFOCUS consistent, we don't have to make changes for each release, it will be very helpful.

More charts, because I like to see more graphs and get more understanding of data by seeing it as a graph.

Upgrade and more module training, we are about to do an app studio upgrade and our team is working on getting training for our agency.

It's too complex to setup the security features.

Making it more user-friendly and providing good documentation as user reference guide, online guides, etc.

The interface can be more user-friendly, learning the product via a classroom format. App studio needs to copy report without issue renaming.

We found some minor flaws like password encryption. The Information Builders tech support provided us workarounds.