The only challenge here is that it's a Java-based platform. It requires very high technical skills. 

When we come to the integration with the single sign-on facilities, that part is very challenging. In Power BI and other tools, it's very easy to integrate with active directory and single sign-on, and identity management is very easy in other business intelligence tools. However, when it comes to Knowage, it's a bit heavy, it's time-consuming sometimes, it's not very fast, and definitely not as fast as other business intelligence tools in terms of getting graphical reports. 

The solution could be cheaper.

It would be better if more resources were available to help us learn how to use it. I wanted to use Knowage for a more extended period, but learning materials around the product were not really available and were not really straightforward.

I've also seen inconsistencies between versions. For example, under the tools, especially in the cockpit, the way you create reports is now different. You will also find some configurations within a particular state, like a line chart, which differs from version to version. I think consistency is an essential feature in a product, especially for business intelligence products.

The integration could be better. We've been struggling a bit with embedding it without the need to log on. 

The dashboard components could be better. They could do a lot more. If you compare it with Power BI, for example, then you can see that they can do a lot more and have more components on the other side. If they could increase their components and then just reduce the bugs that come with the components as well it would be so much better.

In my project, I used the 2.0 version of product. It had some room for improvement and features that the latest version now has. For example: the new users interface, improved performance of the analytical engines, etc.

Nonetheless, there is room for further improvement. As all software and especially the open-source ones have always something that can work better, in this case, SpagoBI is slightly difficult to implement. However, in my opinion, it is much better than other open-source solutions and otherwise is in line with what the open-­source market has offered over the years. For this reason, one of the rooms for improvement is certainly the user friendliness of product.

Another point of improvement is the robustness, but open-source software has a major advantage over closed-source software, and that is the source code can be reviewed by a large number of highly diverse programmers and developers of the community. Thus, it is easier to find and correct errors than when the code is reviewed only by in-house programmers who are often under pressure to meet deadlines and who might not have strong incentives to find and eliminate all the bugs.

Improve the intelligence location and geo report, because it's very difficult to implement this part and there's not a lot of documentation.

I also suggest to provide help for the developer in writing his query in QBE; it would be very helpful.

• User interface

It is also missing a global report parameters feature. A report user needs to specify report parameters separately for each report. The parameter values can't be shared across other reports, which can be a little frustrating for the end users.

Let's say you have 10 reports with the same two parameters: Start and End Date. If the client wants to execute all 10 reports for a specific period of time, he needs to go to each report, one by one, and enter those two parameters. If he wants to change the period of time and execute all reports, he needs to repeat all of that again, which can be time consuming and prone to errors. With a global parameters feature, you can have those two parameters in one place and the user can enter the start and end dates only once and execute all of the reports with the same parameter values. Unfortunately, SpagoBi doesn't have such a feature.

There are additional features such as Data Integration, Data Visualization, MobileBI, Cloud BI, Data enrichment and massaging should be implemented in the next release.

SpagoBI is an open-source tool which can be used freely. We expected the community to be bigger than what it currently is. There were geomaps, etc. included with the suite, but we felt they were lacking compared to JavaScript solutions.

I faced difficulties when using the email feature and documentation was scant. Each recipient had to be added separately in the schedule. Turning the document into PDF, passing parameters (daily, weekly, monthly), etc. The issues could be sorted out mainly but required consulting a variety of resources and reading the logs.

Another issue was connection pooling, which I know is not specifically Spago’s domain. The system ran out of database connections after a few weeks, after our staff used it to generate 50 or so invoices one by one, delivered blank reports and needed a restart to release connections.

Development of SpagoBI has now been moved to Knowage. Users interested in further developments of the platform will have to look there.

Speaking of a very complete suite, I think there is no area that can be considered fully mature. I think there is chance to improve the product in every direction.

• We are not happy with the poor graphic user interface. It looks a bit old and sometimes it is not properly user friendly. I think a global re-styling is a must.
• Speaking of a BI suite, I think this is an important point. The SpagoBI Studio, which is used by developers to create traditional reports and dashboards, is not fully mature. It is still missing a lot of functionalities.
• For example, the UI for building charts is not complete and does not allow you to do everything that you need to edit configuration files with a text editor.

SpagoBI could benefit from some improvements in development and analysis.
At the analysis level, we provide forecasting for clients/customers to compare with what was previously seen at the reporting level.

In development, we could do the same as analysis in coding level.

Bring back the Mobile Edition in new releases.

At the time the organization I worked for scheduled over a thousand jobs at any given time, and some were very complex. The demands of some jobs (IT special formatted) would slow Spago and lock the site, preventing any other job from processing. On the backend, one of the technicians would have to go in and kill the job that stopped, to resume functioning. There was no active visibility into processing as the dashboard was often behind, and confirmation emails would overlap, or wouldn’t generate.

Many things need to be improved, most of all..robustness. the idea to combines many features in single point of view still became a stronger point. Keep improve in solution robustness and this solution could be one of the leaders

Because it is an open source BI tool, there are many areas of improvement:

• The UI is not very profound.
• The Widgets are not ample enough to showcase data in different formats
• The support is very meager: We had to break our heads to figure out everything