Zudy VINYL Pros and Cons

The Lite Integration is really the key thing. You're able to attach the Vinyl software to a variety of different systems very easily and pull data together in a way that is really difficult to do using traditional technology... Also, the fact that it's a no-code platform also makes it easier for people to understand and deal with internally, to continue to build applications and modify existing applications.

With the Lite Integration, I didn't to have to disrupt my entire organization to do something. We haven't had to disrupt IT and the business organizations to keep them up and running.

VINYL has given us the ability to really improve the speed with which we deploy releases and respond to the good ideas that our people have.

It's customizable to whatever you see might use it for... It's very user-friendly, and the front-end is exactly what we need to see, very simple. It can get more complicated too, if those are the needs.

It's extremely easy to use in getting into the IDE and then back down to your applications, and getting from your applications to your pages, and navigating through all your tables. That's very simple and pretty intuitive.

It allows us higher visibility into our data, which allows us to data-check faster, and validate data that we had not been able to validate, prior.

It's like breaking apart coding and development into an ultra-configuration tool... It really is flexible.

Maintenance is very minimal. With our live production applications, they just don't break, which is great. We love that. There's zero-to-little maintenance required.

VINYL has really helped us speed up application development at a reasonable cost.

There are two most valuable features: one is the ability to pull data from a bunch of different places and put them together. And the second is the speed at which you can get a new app developed. So instead of waiting months for this new app to come out, if you have an internal team putting it together, you can roll it out in weeks. I've even seen days. It's incredible how fast you can make changes.

The fact that it's no-code is one of the most important features because it allows us to deliver very quickly. We can get the value to the business delivered much more quickly than with other solutions.

It's made things seamless and it's more efficient, and there's an audit trail where it wasn't there before.

The way that they've done some of the reports, they've created really great data dumps. If I want to see a snapshot of something in time, for a given timeframe, I can download it. From that download, I can create further analysis or do my own thing with it, which is really helpful. I'm even able to go back several years and get data.

While some of the reporting functionality is adequate, reporting needs to continue to be worked on, given the fact that there are a lot of really good reporting tools out there.

The features that I'd like to see in VINYL next would be the ability to have more control over, or have a rule-based control over column headings and column labels.

I would love to have the home screen a little more customizable because, as we're building more and more reports, it would be nice to have more options in how they're organized on the screen.

When you are trying to delete certain columns or delete or drop tables, it will throw an error and it will force you to hunt down every location where those things are being referenced. You have to delete them from the very end and work your way backward... It would be easier, when you're deleting that table, if it would concatenate all the way down.

There are a lot of almost "hidden" features captured in these Edge Case settings... If you want a scroll bar at the bottom, instead of having it select rows to show, you have to select Disable Panel Location Service, which doesn't sound at all like what it's supposed to do. Naming conventions could be changed a little bit.

One of the troubles we have sometimes is the amount of data we're processing within the applications. That can really add a lot of "laggy-ness." That's an ongoing struggle we're going to have while we use it. It doesn't happen for all our applications, only some of them that are heavy on the reporting.

Some new features I think I'd like to see is visibility into running jobs so that we can see what the status is, or it's not stuck in its process and doing its thing, or how much longer it's going to take. I'd also like to see a native calendaring function so we can put calendars into our apps with maybe even recurring tasks or appointments and that sort of thing. We'd also like to see multi-select lists. The users being able to pick multiple things to filter on and get a list and be able to export that list.

Right now it's very dependent on having an imagination to understand.

Version 2.3 has a good UI but we want a more customizable UI.

Once or twice, when a new version of VINYL comes out, it has had a negative impact on a feature. However, we do everything in a test environment. Unless we miss something in test, we don't go live with it if it isn't perfect. Zudy hasn't had too many stumbles along the way, but there have been a couple times, and it's been minor.

If it could be prettier, it might be a bit more attractive on the business side. The most meaningful improvement might be done in some of the aesthetics of the reporting and dashboarding.