Fluent

Happy with Windward

NCC has been using Windward products as the reporting component of our land information system for over a decade now. It has always worked well for us, and we're planning to continue using it following a major system upgrade this coming year. Customer service and tech support has been great over the years, so we're pretty happy. Their developers have been responsive to requests from us regarding certain features, which is really nice.

Windward: A Cool Breeze and Breath of Fresh Air

When I was first tasked to find a new DocGen provider I muted my mic on Teams and cursed. Then I hit the internet and kept seeing a name pop up in the best of list round-ups, Windward. In the search for the perfect DocGen solution, I learned that simply searching for dynamic document generation turned up a lot of results that made it hard to find what we were looing for. I found that if I looked specifically for dynamic document elements, my search was greatly narrowed down and Windward allows for the most dynamic document elements of any other provider I looked into. Their test documents revealed that they were considering nearly every test case I was hoping to prove out. So, immediately they reduced my investigation time, by being so upfront. They can control for tables, images, text, colors, graphs, whole pages of a document and all of the elements within the document with variables in the data I pass. We had a use case scenario they said they had never heard before and sat with us to work through the problem and then came back with alternate solution that was perfect. Windward not only has exceeded any expectations, but they've absolutely impressed me with their service and their feature-rich product. As a company, we wanted a solution that could take us to the next level. Windward has helped us create proposals for our clients that look like they were crafted by hand specifically for that client. Windward makes our company look great.

Combine hundreds of MS Word reports, tens of thousands of lines of code, a report in seconds!

We're thrilled to have found this product! We recently finished a large PHP project and used Windward Reports (Autotag and Javelin Rest Services) as the reporting engine. Much of those reports employed some very large and complex scenarios. "Many" logical branches (If, Case, Loops). What the reporting package didn't have, we were able to create and add in the form of our own C# custom functions to fill the gap to handle everything from JSON Arrays to specialized functions to manage complex English linguistics. The ability to create a live report (WYSIWYG) right within Word, use styles and native MS Graphs lets Windward reports really shine through! You'll love it!

While we built our reports upon one data source (MySQL), the package itself easily handles dozens of data types to import and work with. The speed at which we are seeing these reports generate is also worth noting. Extremely fast considering the number of iterations for the number of calculations. Autotag (the report designer add-in) also allows for variables to easily get passed into the reports and lets you create PODS to share variables and data you've used between users and designers.

The real magic though is their fantastic support team backed by some A1 developers. What we didn't understand, Windward always explained to us and if something didn't work in the product, support made sure we had a work around or the product itself was able to perform at the required level.

If you're looking for a reporting solution that backs onto Microsoft Office, can be built in as a service to run independently or from a user workstation (Autotag), I highly recommend you check out Windward Reports before investing time in other products!

Of course, every rose has a few thorns and Autotag is without exception. We did find a few things!
1. Expect a learning curve. Debugging a report or figuring out why a report might not run can be challenging as your reports grow in complexity.
2. Graphs do not always appear as they should when output into PDF and other formats. However, Windward is addressing this now developing a new PDF engine to output with.
3. If you use a lot of complex formatting and styles, expect some challenges and minor nuances.

Enabling Technology making document generation easy

Awesome Service for Report Generation

The experience has been excellent! Support is superb!

Very useful tool to create business documents

Creation of complex business documents, from various database datasets.

Template design made easy

Windward studios is an interesting product if you want to flexible yet sound template making without the help of IT. The support team reacts very quickly although they can not always accommodate.

The best Publishing tool

Great experience working with Winward. Very responsive team, They really care about your experience. Most of the time I am dealing with very complex situations and they never brushed me off. Great product, great support and I see that product is changing all the time to evolve to better and better version.

Awesome Product

Implementing Windward to manage our invoicing and customer communications is a breath of fresh air! Unlike XSL templates, anybody can easily create and update templates using the Report Designer. It is a piece of cake – it didn’t require me technical knowledge or even a formal training… just applied simple logic and it was like something I’ve been doing for years!

As a portfolio lead and business analyst, I’ve seen quite a lot of applications/tools that end up making the business adjust to satisfy how the application works. But not Windward, it is an application that adjusts to work for the business!

Great tools to manage documents

WIndward Studios Designer has all of the functionality you need to generate reports from a...

We reduced the time to generate 100+ page contracts from 24 hours via cut and paste methods (and an average 15 days turnaround, to literally 5 minutes and 1 day turnaround. At 8 Contract updates per month average, we estimate that 1 person-year will drop to a week or so. The PMO sponsors are thrilled; they free up to do higher value work. The ROI is hugely compelling.

Meets all our needs

Windward Studios

I use this tool (Auto tag) weekly to design reports and have different outputs such as *.docx, *.xlxs, ...

Windward document generation

The purchase of the software was straight forward. Software and licenses were easy to install. Windward software is as advertised. Support is great. Windward recommended a professional services vendor that delivered as well as the Windward product. I strongly recommend Windward as a document generation solution.

A great piece of kit

I have been using Windward for nearly 2 years now and it has been the root cause of us being able to achieve what we set out to do. Needing to eradicate a number of repetitive Excel based reports, Autotag allowed us to build robust templates and improve our reporting ability and have greater control over our data.

A powerful tool for automating the doc generation.

We use the Java engine to generate docs (PDF & Word) through a web application, and it's quick and straightforward to implement. Overall it's a great tool to create automated reports for web applications.

AutoTag templates -

Superior service. Originally, the engine server failed to generate document output for our AutoTag templates. Windward analyzed and found that an exception was being thrown: "please see 'v16 RD exception received.txt'." They resolved the issue quickly with a patch and later added the fix to an updated formal version of the engine. The support team member helping me was very helpful and courteous. I have found the tag tree very helpful since it allows me to copy and paste code from other tags. I can then make some quick modifications to that code to suit the tag I am currently working on.

Enterprise Reporting

Quick to use but powerful and customizable. Easy to integrate with a nice API.

Review for Windward Java Engine

We need to create commercial quality operation reports. Windward is a perfect fit. It reduced our report development time a lot. The support is very good.

Powerful and smart reporting system

I've worked with a number of different report tools. Nothing I've seen comes close to Windward. I'm only bummed I didn't find them 2 years ago.

I make complex report outputs that need to pack in a lot of data, and communicate complex results graphically. My biggest issues with other systems are overflow, brittleness, and overall template hell. With Windward, I'm no longer getting pages with large empty patches. Editing in Word, I get to leverage a ton of power that's built into Word. Not every permutation you can think of in Word works properly, but so much of it does, that you can pretty much do any graphic layout. Word makes styling tables and whatnot a breeze. And you can leverage things like font/paragraph styles, which is really great. It's super easy, intutive, and flexible.

Bottom line for me - in 5 days, I was able to generate a beautifully branded template with full-bleeds, nested tables and loops, and fairly complex conditionals. This new template was a substantial improvement on my previous report templates using other systems. And I did it in a fraction of the time.

That's the product, but the customer support also deserves some serious kudos. Whenever I've had any issue, they have been super on top of it. Their response has been immediate and they're actively developing to meet my stated needs. When the issue has been tough, they've offered work-arounds until their team gets the issue fixed.

I'd highly recommend Windward.

Powerful reporting to improve your products or services in a snap

We replaced a self built reporting system in our SaaS product with the Windward solution, when we were struggling to find another solution which could do the same. The engine integrated with our data sources in a snap, and AutoTag allowed us to replicate the reports quickly. We now have a hybrid system, which sometimes has to use our older reporting engine (for very specialised reports) but uses the Windward engine as much as possible.

Windward is a great product to use

A great way to answer clients' customization requests without (almost) any dev work

Beautiful Documents made Easy

We love the simplicity of making templates in Word, and if we need to make changes its as simple as opening, editing, and re-saving the template. The hardest part is the configuration but it only has to happen once and it was easy to find help. We produce a lot of dynamic content that has strict brand guidelines, other tools did not respect the layout, colors, and image quality. This is the first tool we found that can meet all our needs.

Powerful product which is constantly evolving and growing.

Templates

Easy to learn

Create 1 template and the dynamic text populates automatically. Avoids the need for complex html coding to build nice looking reports.

Great product, beautiful output, fabulous support

Windward AutoTag is one of several tools that we use to produce data-driven proposal output for a wide range of customers. While other tools may be more powerful in their near-limitless extensibility through incredibly complex JavaScript, AutoTag is the only solution that produces meaningfully useable native Office output. While other tools build documents that from a technical standpoint can be opened in Word or Excel but are difficult bordering on impossible for users to modify because they're built as a series of nested tables (Word) or spreadsheets pretending to be page layouts, AutoTag lets us build templates that output documents that truly behave like native Office documents. If you add or remove text in Word, the content reflows like a real Word document (because it IS a real Word document). If you change values in Excel, totals and discounts (for example) recalculate automatically. It isn't the solution to every reporting need, but it's a valuable addition to our toolbox and stands alone when native Office output is required.

Winward Autotag - a great piece of kit.

Best Customer Service Ever

We are not a large client to Windward, but they always make us feel that way. Every time we have a question or suggestion, we get an impressively timely response. Even things that other vendors might charge us for, if Windward feels it would improve the product, they roll it into the next release. Their service greatly exceeds that of vendors we pay seven figures a year.

From a product respective, it is exactly what they advertise. A Microsoft Office design environment for enterprise data. And the server engine makes Crystal Reports look like a dinosaur from a speed perspective.

The major downside I've seen has been in the server pricing which only has a "per core" option. This has caused us to have to engineer our datacenter / redundancy design differently than if we did not have this constraint.

Perfect Tool for creating templates and documents

Great for quickly developing tagged templates

Powerful form rendering engine

CodeObjects is a cloud based SaaS solution for insurance process management that goes beyond the core of policy, billing, and claims to include all the ancillary functions. One of the ancillary services that we provide is document generation and we use Windward for this. Before windward we were using an Adobe based document rendering engine. Switching to windward helped us with the following:
- Reduced the time it takes to create document templates by about 80%
- Reduced the time it takes to configure complex form generation rules by more than 80%
- On an average our customers were able to learn the windward tool by about 70% faster compared to the Adobe product.
Overall it provided a great advantage to us in this competitive Landscape.

Excellent Product for Technical Report Writers

We've been using Windward Reports for well over 5 years now as the main reports tool within our Personality product. As the development piece (AutoTag) is a plug-in for Microsoft Office tools it makes formatting simpler if you know how to do so in Word/Excel already.

We've created some incredibly complicated reports with this tool and our technical people find it easy to use but we don't find it as an end user reporting tool.

Highly recommend it for companies looking for a new tool to create their company reports in.

Great reporting software once you figure out the niggles

Been using the Autotag software for nearly a year and a half now. Of which we use it extensively for fixed reporting. It isn't necessarily an easy to learn reporting system as it is pretty much bound by the restrictions in Microsoft Office. Furthermore there are a number of niggles which you need to learn to work-around to use it.

However once you have done you will be using a reliable, fast and powerful piece of software for all your fixed reporting needs. Not to mention the great support which Windward offers!

Fast, fast report / PDF generation for production environments

I'll start with the only con, it isn't cheap - but then cost is relative - we compared with other similarly scalable products and then, well, it looked much more favourable!

If you need to generate multi-page PDF documents in fractions of a second based on simply tagged word documents and some data to fill in the blanks then these are the people to talk to. Windward Reports does much more - but even for this it is worth the cost.

Support is great, the team is very friendly too.

PSiDEO's review of Windward Solutions

PSiDEO has been successfully collaborating with Windward Solutions for many years as well as using Windward's products in its own solution with satisfaction for the same period. Additionally to performing products, Windward has also supported PSiDEO's activities by being open and flexible with its business models and negotiation schemes to ensure both companies business operations and needs are met in a collaborative and efficient way.

Great solution for integrating word templates into business process

We use Windward to in a business process that generates correspondence by merging data in various forms with Word templates. We have hundreds of templates and generate thousands of documents. It is all automated. It works great when you need to do this as part of a greater business process. I would highly recommend this product.

User friendly and good 3rd party integration

I like using Windward. I like the drag and drop features, it connects easily to our database and integrates well with 3rd part apps like Office.

Easy to use, learning curve minimal.

In the set up we had a few questions on some very detailed modifications and the customer service was amazing!!!! It was very easy and turn around time on customer request was the best we have experienced.

Big Data Analytics

The AutoTag add-in our analytics team uses for reporting has significantly improved our analysis productivity and helped us to view metrics which aid management in making better data-driven decisions.