Microsoft Crescent is a really cool Business Intelligence tool. Once everything is in place using it is incredibly easy and intuitive. And you can very easily play around with data to see what is going on. The most impressive to me is where you can have a chart animate and change over time so you can see the change in X/Y values over time. Super cool.
Add in Report Builder and you have a really good B.I. stack. (Report Designer too but that is a developer tool that is nice, but nothing great.) Again really powerful ways to set up data to perform ad-hoc queries on. ReportBuilder does a good job of providing a lot of control while keeping it pretty easy to use. You definitely need to be a power user, but you don't need to be a developer.
So how does Windward AutoQuery stack up against these? While I would like to say we're clearly superior, I have to admit that Crescent is comparable to AutoQuery. We're better in some ways, they're better in others. But to a large degree we're similar. Microsoft has done a really good job here and we're going to have to put in a lot of additional effort to surpass Crescent.
So which should you use? The simplest criteria is what you have installed. If you have SharePoint 2010, Sql Server Denali, etc. all installed then you have Crescent up and running. Use Crescent.
On the flip side if you do not have some (or all) of the required Crescent components installed and you just want to quickly get ad-hoc B.I., then use AutoQuery. In this case the Crescent route will require a lot of time and effort to install, configure, and administer all the components in the Crescent stack. For AutoQuery you install it on your workstation and you're in business.
How much control do you need over layout? With Crescent you have tables, cards, & graphs and you can arrange those blocks beside each other. That makes layout/report format simple, but also limited. With AutoQuery you are designing in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint so you can have any layout you wish.
What do you wish to display? With Crescent you have tables, cards, & graphs and that's it. If you want something else such as paragraphs of narrative text independent of a cell then you can't do that. Again with AutoQuery what you display can be anything.
Do you need to edit the semantic layer regularly? Both systems make that easy. But AutoQuery also gives you the option of directly querying the underlying data directly rather than having to edit the semantic model. I think it's better to edit the semantic model regardless (I'm a programmer) but if you want the option of going directly, only AutoQuery provides that.
Crescent does not have drill-down which I think is really weird. I think their approach is you would create another chart/table and when you click on an item in one chart, you see the detail on the other. But there are a lot of cases where clicking on an item you want to see a new set of detailed charts/table for that specific item. If you want that, AutoQuery is your only choice.
If you like the model of clicking on a specific item in a chart or table and having the other charts/tables display data for that one item, then Crescent is what you want. Both Crescent and AutoQuery support the mode where you select variable values from a list/tree and build all elements from that variable selection. (But come back in 3 months – we have some work on interactive charts that we started well before we saw Crescent. I think that will give us a nice advantage on this part.)
And with all the specifics above I think it comes down to two main items. First Crescent is a bit simpler to use, but in return is limited in functionality compared to AutoQuery. So the question is will simple work well for you?
And second it's the effort to install/configure/administer Crescent vs. none of that for AutoQuery. I think this is the key issue. If your company has Crescent in place and running – use it. It's all there, you have peers you can ask for help, and it gets the job done. If you do not have Crescent in place, then go with AutoQuery and avoid all the time and effort that would be required to install Crescent.
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Adds various capabilities such as inequalities,descending sort, joins, and other functions.
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SQL Select Debugger
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Added a Query tab as a field for typing or pasting in a select statement
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All tags using that Data source will be automatically updated with that name.
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New single interface to replace 2 separate dialog boxes
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Displays of all the tags in the template, structured as they are placed in the template. This provides a simple & intuitive way to see the structure of your template. Also provides the capability to go to any tag and/or see the properties of any tag.
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The ability to integrate the Windward Engine into Google’s cloud computing platform for developing and hosting web applications dubbed Google Applications Engine (GAE).
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This new integration will allow for processing of complex scripts and bi-directional text such as Arabic. Your PDF output will be much tighter and more closely match your template, and we’ll be able to respond rapidly to PDF requests and fixes.
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Includes support for new ForEach and slide break handling, table header row repeat across slide breaks, and native Microsoft support for charts and images.
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Tags are color coded in the template by type, making it easy to visually identify them.
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Version 13’s core code has been reworked and optimized to offer a reduced memory footprint, faster PDF generation and full documentation of supported features and limitations in the specifications for DOCX, XLSX and PPTX.
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Documents can include advanced Word image properties such as shadows, borders, and styles.
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Windward has updated HTML output to reflect changing HTML standards.
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Windward now works with a slew of new datasources: MongoDB, JSON, Cassandra, OData, Salesforce.com
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The Generate Code tool in the designer allows you to open an existing template and, with a click of a button, automatically create a window with the code needed to run your current template with all data sources and variables. Simply copy this code and paste into your application's code in the appropriate place. You now have Windward integrated into your application.
You only need to do this once. You do not do this for each template. Instead, where it has explicit files for the template and output, change that to parameters you pass to this code. Same for the parameters passed to Windward. This example uses explicit values to show you what to substitute in where.
Any pivot tables in an XLSX template are carried over to the XLSX output. The ranges in the pivot ranges are adjusted to match the generated output. So your final XLSX will have pivot tables set as expected in the generated file.
This makes creating an XLSX workbook with pivot tables trivial.
In an imported sub-template, if its properties for a style (ex. Normal) differ from the parent template's properties for the style, the use in the sub-template can be set to either use the properties in the sub-template, or the properties in the parent.
You set to retain when you don't want the child template's styling to change when imported. You set to use the parent when you want the styling of the imported template to match the styling in the parent.
Any explicit styling is always retained. This only impacts styling set by styles.
Tags can be placed in text boxes. Including linked text boxes. This gives you the ability to set the text in a textbox from your data.
Tags can be placed in shapes & smart art. This gives you the ability to set the text in a shape from your data.
When generating HTML output, the engine can either write bitmaps as distinct files the generate HTML references, or it can embed the images in the HTML providing a single file for the output.
You can place tags in pretty much any part of a template, including in footnotes & endnotes.
Any parts of a DOCX or XLSX (PowerPoint does not support this) file that are locked in the template, will be locked the same in the output.
If a font used in the template does not exist on the server generating a report, the font to substitute can be specified.
In addition, if a glyph to be rendered does not exist in the font specified, you can specify the replacement font. This can be set distinctly for European, Bi-Directional, and Far East fonts.
If you need this - it's essential. And if you don't need it, it's irrelevant.
Windward enables you to build a document by applying multiple datasources to the template simultaneously. When Windward is merging the data into a template, it processes the template by handling each tag in order, and each tag pulls from different datasources. (As opposed to processing all of one datasource, then processing the next.)
This allows the select tag to use data from another datasource in its select. For example, if you are pulling customer information from one data source, you can then pull data from the sales datasource using the customer ID of the customer presently processing to pull the sales information for that customer. If you're interested in patching together your data from multiple datasources, read this post on our blog.
