We also looked at HotDocs. 

We chose Windward because it was the quickest to respond. They had a seven-day trial that was available, which was easy for me to download, and start using their application and to build out a proof of concept within a couple of hours. It was also more cost-effective than the competition, and that sweetened the deal.

Before we started the proof of concept on Windward two-and-a-half years ago, we did market research on document generation tools. I did download and try out Crystal Reports. The look and feel of Crystal Reports is something like Windows XP, or it was at that point. The look and feel of the AutoTag plugin and the designer of the Microsoft 2017 plugin was a lot better. 

We also went with Windward vs Crystal Reports because we had in mind that our customers, at some point, would be able to maintain their own reports. Our customers are mostly proficient in Microsoft Office and not in another tool. So we found that to be a big plus.

We're constantly looking for market improvements and the like. We haven't seen anybody in this particular area that can address a couple of things. It's not just about the software. It goes back to the business side of things. It's knowing that if I had to call Windward up and say, "By the way, we need X, Y, and Z," they'd say, "We're on it." You can't get that in some partnerships. I have some partners that I wish would follow their example.

I looked at Advantive. It had nowhere near the functionality and the support for the OpenOffice format that Windward had engineered over the years.

Because it was seven or eight years ago, I don't remember a lot of what we looked at. I do remember we looked at Crystal Reports, but we looked at somewhere between a half dozen and a dozen different options before paring it down and going with Windward. If you compare something like Windward to something like Crystal Reports, Windward is cheap. Crystal Reports is outrageously priced.

We didn't have any other solutions on our shortlist. We couldn't find a solution that did what we needed to do. We needed a solution to enable us to tag a document template and, from our database, populate that document template and not alter the formatting and not mess it up. Sometimes, if a system is being populated from a database, a table is off and it's all goofy. We had a number of companies that could do document generation, but when we got the document back it was all messed up and we would have had to fix it. We publish to Windward and it's correct 100 percent of the time. We never have to monkey around with the document after it's gone through Windward.

We did not evaluate other products specifically, because we had a deal-breaker checklist of what was required. Of all the products we went through, Windward was the only one to meet all the requirements.

I created a VBA version that would build Excel spreadsheets, formatted so that PDFs could be created that looked identical to what might have been created in our old software. However, many users needed to have Word-formatted versions of these documents. 

We were comparing Windward to SSRS, Microsoft Sequel Server Report Services, which is one other kind of report-building product. I downloaded a few demos and tried them.

We looked at OpenText and we were thinking of OpenText as a grander solution. But at that point in time, we didn't have the capacity to go through a full procurement process, which is what would have been required for an OpenText solution. So we ended up doing a quick prototype and proof of concept with Windward.

The biggest issue I had was that all of those other solutions had a proprietary report builder, whereas we already had these documents in Word. All we had to do was use the templates we already had and just add the text fields, the form fields, and the merge fields into those documents. It was very quick for us to do the initial round of comparisons. All the other products we looked had their own report builder and we would have had to rebuild all the Word templates in a proprietary report builder.

For us, that was a key feature that we wanted to leverage.

From time to time, some of our clients will ask why we are using Windward, why not the product they are using. We have done comparisons and it's comparable to any other product in the market. It does everything that the client's product does and it's already integrated, so why re-invent the wheel and integrate their product with our product?

Existing products in the market are quite comparable in features and performance.

This is my first foray into reporting software. I did evaluate Crystal Reports, and some other well known reporting software. It just seemed to me that Windward would be easier. And I loved the idea of being able to generate templates myself in the programs that I wanted to have as the ultimate reporting tool, like Word and Excel. That was the selling point to me. I hadn't used any in the past, so I had nothing to compare it to. That was my decision-maker, that's why I went with Windward.

Several solutions.

We evaluated a lot of other options, but this is the best for our architecture and the easiest to integrate with our app.

The Windward solution was very fast to rollout, and it is proven. A custom solution costs a lot of money to build.

Intelledox, that's an Australian-based company and does similar things - probably more expansive than Windward, has a lot more features - but features that we wouldn't need anyway. We're only looking for a report-generator, and it was on a per-page basis, so that was one of the reasons why we didn't chose that.

Pentaho and Oracle BI were the main contenders.

No other options were evaluated.

iText and Jaspersoft.

We looked at a couple of others, although I do not remember the names.

BIRT and JasperReport.

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.

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

We also evaluated Jaspersoft Report Designer.

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

I was not involved in the process. But I was told that Windward was the only one they could find as a better product in terms of delivering what our clients wanted at that time.