Enabled us to turn report design over to the business users

What are the best aspects of this product?

With Windward we were able to turn report design over to the business users. This has allowed them for the first time to get exactly what they want (the free-form design is a large part of that), and to do so immediately.

It has also gotten us in dev out of the report design business which was taking up a ton of time.

What aspects are problematic or could work better?

We have to pay for it. We were previously using an open source free product. But we save a lot more in reduced dev time than what we spend on Windward, so it is a price we save money on.

What features/services would you like to see in future versions of this product?

We want to have embedded Excel worksheets in some of the Word documents that are tagged for Windward. It carries the embedded XLSX to the output, but it does not process it for tags in the embedded document.

I requested this functionality and they said it will likely be delivered sometime in 2019.

What specific problems in your company were solved by this product?

Two giant solutions. First, business users were constantly complaining about the delay to create or revise reports. And then when we did deliver a template to them, once they saw it in action, they wanted more changes. The scheduling delays and the back and forth was a royal PITA all around.

Second, the previous solution was pretty limited in what you could do in a template. Now between Word and Excel (we are not using PowerPoint yet), our business users can design pretty much anything. Although some of them could do with better artistic skills (the users, not Windward).

Are you a current user of this product?

Yes