Their PDF needs improvement. We've run into some issues when we tried to generate a Word document. If we try to generate the same document in PDF, sometimes it doesn't look exactly the same.

We have gone back to Windward support a couple of times on a few issues, e.g., we had some issues with reports that had barcodes on them. The barcode wasn't displaying properly. It was displaying as a skewed image as opposed to an actual barcode. Therefore, we worked with Windward support, having some daily calls with them. Then, within the next release, they were able to resolve the issue. They even gave us a pre-release, so we could implement it into our code before the actual official release on the website.

It would be nice to have some sort of workflow capability within the product. Anytime you generate a document, nine out of ten times there is something which precedes that document, whether it's entering parameters in, e.g., if I'm requesting the status report for a project. The first thing that I usually want from a status perspective is which project is the status report for and which week is it for, as those are some of the things that I have to supply before I can generate a document. From a workflow perspective, it would be nice to say, "This project belongs to this person, and this person is okay with me pulling information out of this document for whatever need I have."

From a workflow perspective, I would like a wizard interface that goes step-by-step, like a questionnaire, where there are a bunch of things that you have to answer, "Yes or no," before it knows what to do or how to produce the document. Right now, we write our own custom UI for this.

Regarding AutoTag, we do notice that when you want to refactor a little bit of your template design or when you want to implement changes, sometimes you need a lot of clicks to get the change done. For instance, if only one identifier's name is changed and you need to change that identifier throughout your documents, it would be helpful to be able to do a find-and-replace, find all the identifiers with the old name and replace them with the new name. We haven't found a way to do that with a find-replace tool. Throughout the Windward user interface, you need a lot of clicks to get that done. That can be a somewhat tedious task. If you want to do somewhat more technical tasks, the front end can be a little bit slow or inefficient because you need to perform a lot of clicks to get the technical change done.

Also, there's always a little bit of a struggle for our customers to get the licensing done. That is because we develop on a platform that would prefer a Java Engine. The platform will communicate better with a Java Engine. The platform also does install with many instances, and the problem is that for every instance you have to pay for a license which will then increase the cost enormously.

Instead of using the integrated Java Engine we are now using th RESTful engine, which is kind of like a standalone Windward instance that we can call as a service. It generates documents for any of the instances that we want. So instead of having ten Java instances, we only need one RESTful instance for the same functionality, and for one-tenth of the cost. So even though the preferred technical implementation is Java, we are using RESTful, simply because the licensing costs are a lot less. I find it a bit of a shame that the business model doesn't allow us to use the preferred technical implementation.

Any time that we have wanted something, Windward has been right there to build it. I would have a hard time saying what they need to improve on. What I would say is that the industry is going to be looking for continued flexibility in terms of filtering, nesting, and building more complex, almost business-intelligence-type rules and reports. What we're going to need to see is that narrowing of the gap between the analytics and management in terms of what they're going to want to see and view. 

The more sophisticated customer is going to want some of that information shared back with them. That's going to be an area where there'll be some potential improvement. But the Windward team is constantly monitoring that. They've got this under control. We feel we're in really good shape with them.

One of the things we've continued to hear is that our users talk specifically about AutoTag and more concepts around filtering, nesting, and sorting; more flexibility around that. Windward is pushing that envelope and they're doing a great job with it. So we're happy with it.

The licensing key is a little bit twitchy. I'd like to see more HTML formatting support in templates. It has a basic stock of HTML formatting capability, but it doesn't have a rich vocabulary. I have to work around that sometimes. 

The help documentation and blog posts are extensive, but not always up to date.

The error reports also need improvement. If you don't key it in right, it's a little hard to find the root cause. It gives you information as much as it can, but it doesn't really hone in and tell you explicitly what you should do to correct the problem. 

It is a very good product. It does everything we need it to do. The only thing I can think of, that we'd like it to do, would be the ability to "burst out" reports, meaning one section of a report could be sent out as an email to a manager of a department, say, without having to run multiple reports to do it. As it sits now, we have to do multiple reports to do it.

One of the things that we want is the ability to tag documents more easily. The reason it took us so long to get the system up and running is that the APIs could be improved a bit. It could be a little bit more interoperable with software, without having to do a lot of the heavy lifting that we had to do to get it in. Once you get it, it's fine. But it did take a little bit of time, and that's due to the fact that the APIs weren't really there and we didn't have a lot of documentation. There was a lot of going back and forth. They could improve that.

I think the key to this solution is to make it more accessible. Cost is sometimes a consideration for our clients. It would be really helpful if the cost could be reduced to make the solution more affordable for end-users. The software is excellent and provides a breadth of functionality that no other solution offers. We searched the market for a comparable solution and there is no solution that offers comparable features. It is my hope that this application goes mainstream and used by everyone.

It would be nice to have a black-and-white, ideal setup for servers, to maximize capabilities. We went through a lot of scenarios to get something that is scalable. An ideal AWS-package server setup could have saved us a lot of time. But I understand this is very company specific.

I do coding, so I often think that it would be nice to have subroutines, in separate templates, that could be shared among other templates. However, I understand the limitations of Word Field codes.

I have to deal with VERY long lists of properties contained in our XMLs and it would be nice if Windward offered a way to alphabetize this property list. I understand that we could alphabetize our XML and this would happen automatically, but I think this would be a useful tweak for many users. At least if they have to deal with a lot of data like we do.

One thing that frustrated us a little bit is that we have to use the Office PDF generation, because the native PDF generation is always slightly different compared to the one in Office. The formatting is just a little bit off here and there. Sometimes a page-break will not appear. There are always some little differences between the native PDF and the Office PDF. This means that we need to have Office installed on the server to be able to generate these documents via API. That's been a bit of a frustrating limitation for us. 

They do continue to improve that, but because we want to maintain documents exactly as we see them in Word, we have to use the Office PDF generation, instead of the native PDF generation. And that takes a little bit longer to generate as well, whereas if it was the native generation, it would take less than half-a-second. The Office PDF generation takes a bit longer, it can take up to two to three seconds to generate a single document. So there is a bit of a performance hit there.

This is the one negative aspect that we fought through. It didn't stop us from using the solution. But it is something that we hope, over time, will improve. If they could get the native PDF generation to be one-to-one with the Office generation, that would make it an exceptionally good product for us.

A few years back, we suggested they make it work for JSON because we were using XML format. They've already done that JSON formatting. From our perspective, it's meeting our requirements so we had not asked for any improvements in recent times.

I don't see any major change which could benefit us. One thing I could say, as is always the case, is that they could make the document creation performance faster. I'm not saying it's slow but it takes time to create the PDFs. If they could make it faster, that would be one area for improvement. It's not a negative at this point, but the world is moving to ultra-fast performance, so that area is something they can look at. I'd like to see improvement from microsecond to nanosecond performance because that's the kind of demand in the market, to be faster and faster.

• It needs the ability to drill down in a single report (i.e., interactive) into data. 
• The next release could benefit from a cloud-based environment.

About six months ago, we raised the possibility of improving the way they manage HTML 5. Sometimes, when you insert a lot of data in the data source, you get an error because it is not managing HTML 5 features well.

I believe they have addressed this in later versions of their product.

There are some - and they've made some positive changes to this already - but there is always room for improvement in the speed, especially with the complex, multi-line Excel spreadsheets. They made some improvements in the last version that are quantum-fold faster than when I first started. But there is always room for improvement there. You always want reports faster and faster. Everybody wants instantaneous reports, doesn't want have to wait. Anything that can be done to speed that up would be an enhancement, for me. 

The other thing that I have requested that would be nice, there are some Excel formatting things that you lose when you implement a template: some default Excel validation scripts, macros. You could create them in Excel if you were just using Excel, but in creating a template that generates a report, some of those validation things are lost. You just don't have the ability to create them before they are spit out. That would be a nice enhancement to see.

They should add a document distribution solution on top of the document generation capability. It should allow us to send the generated document to a certain recipient (e.g. customer contact’s email address) based on a business-rules management system. That system would allow the end-user to manage a relationship between a document template and its recipient (email, fax, document repository, etc.).

AutoTag needs to be web-based, so our customers can create reports from our web.

It's pretty early stages. We haven't got any constructive feedback yet.

Some graphing capability could be improved and differences in layout for different formats (Word, PDF, etc.).

Two that I found:

1. Was limited by XML path restrictions. There were a couple of times I wanted to do something in the formulas which was prohibited by XML path but okay to do in Excel and the product is sold as being able to do whatever Excel can do in terms of formulas.
2. The wiki is useful but it could be expanded so much more! I had to do so much translating from Excel -> Autotag where the wiki could have gone into more depth. Imagine something with more scope like the Microsoft Excel how to guides. Much more in depth and gives you various examples of how power Autotag can be.
   

Ease of use.

We've been working with Windward and the executives over there over a number of years and they've been quite flexible and helpful with all of our challenges.

If I were to think of one thing - and this is really an opportunity, not something that's a deficiency - a lot of clients that want to use this don't have the technical background for the SQL portion of gathering the data. If Windward were to make a more user-friendly SQL extract front-end, that would help a lot of clients to leverage the application a lot more.

It needs better support for upgrades and more control over layout of elements.  Upgrades tend to break existing output. Elements do not position where expected due to insertion of blank lines and page breaks. It takes time to fix these through trial and error.

I do not have enough experience with it to give an accurate answer. It works great compared to what he had, and the support we have received has been fantastic.

One thing I haven't found a way around so far: Is there any way to avoid AutoTag loading in Word/Excel each time? I need to use it from time to time - quite rarely. AutoTag affects performance of Word/Excel. I do not want to install/uninstall AutoTag each time I need it.

Autotag can be a little confusing for new users, however doing the training webinars will get them on their feet in no time.

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.

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. 

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.

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

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

• 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.

• 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).

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.

I think it needs few other reporting features like grouping data on the report itself.

Initial learning curve seems steep as first - but it does 'click' into place after viewing a few of the free Webinars that Windward offer.

The generation of PDF/Excel reports needs to replicate Word/Excel more closely with less required workarounds.

Error handling – give more details on just what the issue is to help quickly troubleshoot what is wrong.