Windward Core Reviews

Previously we were running reports from SQL Queries and formatting the outputs in Powerpoint Presentations, Word Documents or Excel Spreadsheets. Due to large growth, our reporting needs both externally and internally were taking too much time from the Management Information team to run on a daily basis.

Since the installation of Autotag, users are now able to run reports either for their business area or for their external clients with the MI team assisting on creating the templates. This has delivered huge time savings across the business allowing more time to focus on development and growth opportunities.

The template designer is by far the best feature within Windward Autotag. You build the reports in the Microsoft Applications that you already know, and simply add tags which draw the data in where you need it. The learning curve is very low due to this and also serves as a great way to introduce our junior members to SQL queries.

As Autotag constantly upgrades it does more post processing on the documents. It is still lightning fast for most reporting needs, however for some of the more complex reporting we have noticed a small slow down over previous versions.

Customer Service:

The customer service at Windward is absolutely top notch. Every time I've had a query they have always responded promptly and in a friendly yet professional manner.

Technical Support:

The technical support team is one of the best technical support teams I have ever dealt with. I can keep track of the status of my technical query at any time by logging into their site. They respond very promptly and they really work hard to break through any technical issue.

The primary use case is to create different reports.

We connect using SQL Server.

It saves our time in designing reports. It creates better layouts and performance. We already have more than 20 templates.

We output PDF and Word formats.

Creating dynamic table of contents (TOC) based on dynamic data in different reports. We have different reports generated by users. After generating the report, the user will modify it and add some pages to it. Thus, we need to be able to update the table of contents.

In all other reporting tools, the table of contents is generated based on bookmarks of everything the user wants in the TOC. That means page numbers in the TOC generate at runtime and, if you modify the report, you can’t update the TOC. But AutoTag, follows same tags as Microsoft Word, and you can update the TOC any time after generating your report.

Designing different reports with a variety of features, such as a graph, TOC, using different conditions (like if, then, else, and loops), and layout controls, are essential in report designing.

The tool does not support macOS documents. 

AutoTag generates only Microsoft Office docs. If you try to generate a report on the macOS, you will get error. You can open a saved report on macOS but you can’t generate it directly on macOS.

I cannot suggest more improvements at this stage as I am a new user. 

We are using this tool in a pilot state. There are no issues at the moment.

No scalability issues.

Technical support is very good. They reply immediately and follow-up with any questions.

We previously used C# codes for generating reports. Due to upgrading technology, we decided to use a better tool.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We evaluated Intelledox, Stimulsoft, Crystal Reports, and DevExpress.

After evaluating different reporting tools and inquiring some Windward clients, we decided to opt for this tool. 

We did not consider building a custom solution.

A useful, easy to use product, which has a lot of features for designing reports.

We use AutoTag designer to build reports as well as formatted Word templates for clients that need to send out different information based off of personal.  This tool is great for tagging documents from different data sources such as XML, SQL, and other databases.  The tagging wizard is easy to use and helps with selecting the tags and implementing logic such as conditions, filtering and sorting.

Streamlined the process of quickly producing letters for our clients business that helped in getting patients what they needed quickly from their physicians.

Some drawbacks we have come across are getting the output formatting to match exactly how it is implemented within Word.  Not to the fault of AutoTag itself, but PDF output seems to display differently than Word output.  Even with this slight drawback, it has not stopped us from implementing rich tagged documents for our clients, and even when we run into these issues, Windward's support site and support team is on top of things, coming out with releases every 2 weeks with bug fixes and enhancements, even fixes that were submitted by us.  They are responsive and on top of their game.

The ability to design reports, using all the formatting bells and whistles, in Microsoft Word and Excel. Plus the ability to combine XML data and SQL data.

The most important is how we have been able to produce much more persuasive and professional reports than our peers.

Pricing is based off server cores. This has caused us to have to engineer our production server environment around the product.

6 or 7 years.

None. It is really easy to implement.

The product is very stable, and we have yet to find a scenario where the design environment (AutoTag) was different than our production environment (.NET Engine).

No issues with scalability.

As good as the product is, the customer service is even better. Out of all of the products we use in our company, Windward is hands down the best support without even a close second.

Awesome.

We originally used Crystal Reports, and then tried WSDL. We switched because of the versatility in report design available using Word/Excel.

Very straightforward. AutoTag takes some getting used to, but if you have used a report writer or a macro structure before it comes pretty easily. The production use is even easier. Literally just a few lines of code to delploy.

In-house.

We never evaluated, but it has never been a question.

Try it and you’ll buy it. We have introduced several of our friends to this product and they have all been impressed.

Windward AutoTag is an add-in for Microsoft Word and other products. We use AutoTag to pull in data from our software to create standard documents for all clients, and customized ones as needed.

This solution allows our clients to create their own custom documents on the fly. It allows clients to tweak our standard document templates to meet their needs. We didn't have this feature in the past.

It is very user-friendly, and the wizard and equation options. There is a feature to create "PODs" for data points that you will be using over and over again. You create a POD and save it to your network drive. Then all you have to do is pull it into your next document template when needed. This saves so much time when templates need to be created quickly.

I would like to see examples included within the Wiki information to show how each function option could be used.

Yes. We switched as it was no longer supported. It didn't meet our needs or our clients'.

It's a quick setup, and the license is on an individual basis. I'm not part of the cost or pricing conversations with our clients.

I was not part of the group of people that evaluated other options.

• There's less of a a learning curve than with other reporting tools and it has easy to design complex templates using the AutoTag Microsoft Office plugin.
• I can use Microsoft Office standard features with templates. This has reduced template development time on coding, layouts and formatting.
• We receive customer data in various formats and it is very convenient to pass the XML datasource to generate reports.
• Easy to integrate with our company product using Javelin Server RESTful web-services API.

Reduced design time for complex templates.

• Javelin Server improvements: the ability to change the datasource file path on run-time.
• AutoTag improvements: does not support dynamically changing headers and footers on Microsoft Office Word templates.

I've used it for four years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

10 out of 10 - excellent.

10 out of 10 - excellent, promptly responded to all our queries communicating between the UK and the US.

No solution was used previously.

Setup was straightforward using Javelin Server (Setup using IIS7 & SQL DB) and AutoTag – Microsoft Office 2010.

We implemented it in-house and we received support when required.

Excellent investment for reducing template designing cost. Could not provide percentage numbers.

Day to day cost – None apart from development time for new template design.

We also evaluated Jaspersoft Report Designer.

• It's easy to use
• Use standard Microsoft Office to design complex templates so you can utilize rich Microsoft Office formatting, layouts etc.

• Ease of use and design reporting templates is straightforward with usage of standard MicrosoftWord package.
• Does not require user a huge amount of time to learn all features and how to use a tool with MS package.
• Easily pulls out data from MySQL server into format that can be usable by our internal staff or external customers.

Reduced time in creating reports, as previously used MS Excel to manually create all reports

• Requires some work on page numbers (footer) in Word, as it places the page number in the center, when output in PDF page number is more to right than center.
• Outputting in PDF needs to be like for like with Word.
• Does not supporting text color in charts (does not allow changing legend text color).

I have used it for three months.

No deployment issues encountered.

The tool is stable enough.

No scalability issues encountered.

Great customer service: 10 of 10.

Excellent technical support: 10 of 10.

I haven't previously used a different solution myself, but the company used pure Excel for reporting and it was time consuming.

• Straightforward setup of tool

It was implemented in-house.

Good investment for reducing template/report design time/costs.

Great value; no other costs apart from template design time.

Unable to comment, as I wasn't at the company at that time.

It is a great tool, as using the standard MS package helps with learning, because it uses mostly MS Office functions to design templates.

Generic reporting.

As of now we don't have a lot of experience with this tool because we have only been using it for one month. So we haven't made much progress, as an organization, with it yet.

I think it is a very flexible tool, that is one reason it is valuable for us. But the graphics and pictures in the reports are the most important.

The ability for users to have design and layout control is also very important for us. This is why we chose Windward. 

Maybe just one thing: We would like to shrink these reports into one page, because there is a lot of free space on one page, but we cannot shrink it into the one page to be shorter. This is one thing we would like to change.

No issues with stability.

I think this is fine, but for now our external provider is doing prioritization for us so we don't have experience with this. But I think it is flexible enough. For now, we haven't had any problems with scalability.

We have not used tech support yet.

For now I have only had experience with Crystal Reports.

We were searching for something that is suitable and pleasant for our customers, user-friendly and so on. This was the most important requirement for us. We did not consider building a custom solution. We went with a package solution because our external vendor recommended it to us. They said that this is the only option, that they are working only with Windward and it is the only option for the IT system we are using.

It was not complex.

Right now we have four or five reports in our production environment. In our test environment we have an additional three or four. We are connected with an application from the Dorsum Wealth Management platform and we use the database from that system.

I have recommended Windward to two IT providers, but I haven't had any feedback for now. But I would recommend it. It provides very good-looking, flexible, and nice reports.