Windward Core Reviews & Insights

Score9.1 out of 10

31 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Windward Core are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Intuitive and User-Friendly Interface: Users have consistently praised the intuitive and user-friendly interface of Windward Reports, mentioning that they find it easy to navigate and manipulate tables using drag and drop functionality. Many users appreciate the simplicity of the interface, which allows them to quickly create and complete tasks efficiently.

Responsive Support Team: Users highly appreciate the responsiveness of Windward's support team. They mention that their questions and concerns are addressed promptly and professionally, leading to a positive experience. The support team provides quick assistance whenever needed.

Seamless Integration with Microsoft Office: Users highlight the major advantage of Windward Reports being seamlessly integrated within the Microsoft Office suite. They appreciate being able to leverage familiar features from Office products, such as Word, to easily create visually appealing reports. This integration enables users to work efficiently without requiring extensive technical knowledge or additional software.

Reviews

25 Reviews

Document Generation: Fast, Easy, Done

Rating: 10 out of 10

March 14, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Windward's Document Generation Software is one of the best products out there for aggregating and displaying data from disparate sources. If it can't be done natively, which is rare, you have the ability to extend it through code. We have it integrated with our project reporting database to generate weekly status reports for our clients. No need to track someone down for their hours, tasks that were worked on, and how much time was spent. It truly cuts down the time a project manager needs to assemble a status report.

Pros

Handles data from disparate sources.
Uses well-adopted Microsoft Word as the template designer interface.
Ability to integrate with existing applications.
Ability to extend functionality.
Reusable component creation.

Cons

User friendly error messages.
PDF output sometimes not exact and requires some minor tweaks.
Perhaps more out of the box chart options.

Likelihood to Recommend

It's well suited for organizations that rely on their IT departments to make minor changes to reports that can take days to put into production. Windward Core, with its simple to use Microsoft Word interface, empowers savvy business users to make modifications to reports in minutes. They can even create their own reports with ease. It's a great tool for creating static reports that take manual effort to produce (especially from disparate data sources). If you're looking for advanced drill-down capabilities, Windward is not for you, but then again, it's not designed for that. What it does, it does extremely well and everyone I have recommended it to has been pleased with the end results—to the point it's their centralized global reporting platform.

Hit Mistry

Vice President in Information Technology at PSC Group (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Windward streamlines the documentation process at Banks and Credit Unions

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

January 15, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Windward is a critical component of our Baker Hill NextGen solution, which is used in hundreds of banks and credit unions. We have clients that use this fully integrated solution every day to communicate critical information externally and internally to drive their business needs. By being able to leverage the extensive data sets within Baker Hill NextGen, Windward gives our clients the ability to drive their business and make the decisions they need to grow revenue and minimize risk.

Pros

Leveraging the data sets within Baker Hill NextGen to maximize communication of the data for external and internal purposes.
With the latest releases to the ability to sort and control the flow of data, clients will have a better representation of the information needed to make business decisions.

Cons

I really have not found a big set of gaps with Windward. They are accessible all the time for any suggestions.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are wanting to simply take advantage of a large data set and be able to push this into a really simple and automated document format, there is no better solution than Windward. The fact that I can have this fully integrated into our solution, and that with a minimal amount of training we can have users up and running critical business reports and letters is a huge lift for our solution.

Michael Horrocks

VP Product Management in Product Management at Baker Hill (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

12 years of experience

View profile

Happy with Windward Studios

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

September 27, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Windward helps us to design templates for outgoing communication of our government clients. Designing templates requires zero technical knowledge and has been made very easy. By using Windward, we have saved a lot of development time for creating templates, by being able to directly get feedback from subject matter experts.

Pros

Design templates.
If/else logic, placeholders, repeating attributes, etc.
Microsoft Word integration.

Cons

Licensing is not always clear.

Likelihood to Recommend

I would always recommend Windward unless cost is a major problem for the project.

Verified User

Professional in Engineering (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Windward Studios meets all of our needs

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

September 26, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are an insurance and finance company, and we use Windward to generate documents like insurance declarations, certificates, etc.. Our business analysts use Windwards report design with Microsoft Office products to create templates for our source systems. We also purchased their RESTful API to integrate with multiple source systems and third-party software.

Pros

Windward report designer makes it very easy for our business analyst to create the report and/or document template needed for our business needs.
Windward RESTful report engine makes it easy for us to integrate with other systems.
Windward has excellent support, either with their wiki site or their support technicians.

Cons

When we first purchased Windward, their support for JSON data sources seemed to be lacking.

Likelihood to Recommend

Windward has been great in creating templates for all areas of our company. In our Insurance department, we use it to create insurance declaration packets, certificates, etc. In our Claims department, we use it to create all kinds of reports and data extracts. We also use it to create all of our form applications as well.

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Simple, flexible, and easy to use, even for non-tech people.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

September 26, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is being used by the Software Development team and it allows us to download data from tables with different formatting.

Pros

Looping logic.
Drag and drop coding.
Easy integration with Office.

Cons

Could do with more documentation.
More training videos.
More intermediate to advanced videos to understand the full capability of Windward.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is suited for non-tech people who want to create templates that can be reused. It is less appropriate where a template isn't possible or if the user doesn't want to integrate with a third-party application and wants to code all the logic themselves to have more control and flexibility.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Report automation made easy

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

September 26, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Windward Studios to automate a certain amount of mandatory/regulatory reports that need to be delivered and approved on tight deadlines.

Windward enables us to quickly provide robust and detailed data reports for our clients and regulators. Given that templates can be designed directly in Microsoft products, preparing templates becomes very easy with minimal coding. We are very happy with this product and use it company-wide.

Pros

User-friendly, amazing UI integrated into Microsoft products, no steep learning curve.
Generates large and complex reports at great speeds.
Windward has a great and very responsive support team. Every request or question will be answered in a timely manner.
Support for multiple data sources.

Cons

Lack of documentation regarding the Windward Java Reporting Engine (Linux implementation).
Error messages could be more elaborate/precise.

Likelihood to Recommend

Our company produces lots of mandatory and regulatory reports which are large and complex. Our reports contain a lot of data which is stored in an Oracle Database. Windward allows us to easily use the data in the Oracle DB and produce those reports directly from MS Word. The data-source connector also supports Views and Oracle functions which makes the process even simpler/lighter.

Max Ferreira

Application Developer in Information Technology at FundRock Management Company S.A. (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Windward's template engine is second to none.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

May 24, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Windward Studios to format critical text reports that are delivered to airplane cockpits.

Pros

The ease of using Microsoft Word to create templates is second to none. Most other template engines require a good degree of technical knowledge.
The feature where you can generate code previews through Microsoft Word is very convenient.
Windward support is very quick and helpful
Windward's PODs (partial templates) are very useful for multiple reports that contain common sections.

Cons

Maybe could improve the documentation, although Windward Studios support is always there. A lot of the links on Google to the documentation are obsolete.

Likelihood to Recommend

Windward Studios is well suited for non-technical people to create templates.

Chris Buswell

Software Engineer in Engineering at Collins Aerospace (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Powerful and flexible document generation capability + responsive support = winning solutions

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

May 17, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My company partners with Windward to deliver document generation solutions to numerous client organizations. I have recently worked on solutions that include loan documents for a lender, insurance letters for a medical auditor, and proposal generation for an insurer. The solutions range from generating one document at a time to using a web front end to build a custom selection of documents to combine into a single proposal.

Pros

It is very easy to get up and running to see it work.
There are numerous options for data sources.
Technical support is very responsive and helpful.

Cons

It would be very helpful if it was possible for tag logic to handle an array of data. Without it, the syntax can become very verbose when there are multiple logical conditions to check.
Most tags are only built to handle a single piece of data so it can be a little confusing when a query only appears to return 1 record.

Likelihood to Recommend

Windward makes it very easy to pull data out of a wide variety of data sources in order to dynamically generate documents (forms, letters, etc) in any type of industry.

Verified User

Consultant in Information Technology (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Windward Studios - A Great Value Proposition

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

March 11, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In our cloud-based software solutions for financial institutions, Baker Hill NextGen® and the Baker Hill Legacy solutions, we have integrated with the Windward Engine. Our clients use the Windward Designer to create their documents and upload them to our solution. Then we use the Windward Engine to produce those documents on demand. Our clients are very happy with their custom documents.

Pros

A document can be created in many different formats, like Word or Excel, and be output into many different formats, like PDF, Word, Excel.
The document is generated based on the data and the document template you provide. The template can have conditions to format what is shown based on the data, and still retain the powerful formatting of the platform like Microsoft Word.
Windward Support is very responsive when we reach out with questions or problems.

Cons

The documentation for the Wiki could use more examples of how to use the functions.
We tend not to upgrade very often. When we do upgrade there can be significant feature changes that necessitate template rework.

Likelihood to Recommend

Windward Studios is well suited for documents into which you want to merge data.

Bharati Sadhwani-Tully

Senior Software Developer in Engineering at Baker Hill (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

View profile

Great Solution for Word and Excel Users

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

February 27, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Windward Studios was being used to create custom reporting for SaaS administrators clients. Both our administrators and our clients have different reporting needs and Windward allows each user to create and modify their own report templates based on their specific requirements. Windward reduces the time required for custom report creation and modification.

Pros

Windward handles multiple reporting template formats using tools people are already familiar with. Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel are particularly useful for us.
Windward has great technical support. Questions and issues are always answered in a timely manner.
Windward has multiple pricing options which were helpful for us in getting started.

Cons

I would like to see more organized and up to date documentation and videos for setup and training.
It depends on your particular setup and requirements, but our particular setup required a separate Windows server to run the Restful Engine. A cloud-based web-service that Windward maintains would be preferred.
While Windward's Microsoft based tools are great, they can be a bit intimidating to non-programmers at first glance.

Likelihood to Recommend

Great for Technical Users. It's great for people a bit more on the technical side. It allows developers to quickly create and modify reporting templates without having to modify source code or make updates to a repository.

Potentially Difficult for Non-Technical Users. Making substantial changes to the data portions of reporting can be a bit difficult for non-technical users. While Windward's tools for this are great, it still requires an understanding of the database schema which not all users will have.

Verified User

Executive in Engineering (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

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