Amazingly versatile, however it does carry a significant learning curve to maximize that versatility

Environment to automate regular reporting and to expand and enhance the availability of data to my organization.

Pros

Numerous export formats, versatile software which offers a savvy developer several avenues to accomplish the requirements of their audience. The Active Format is a very unique offering allowing developers to give users the ability to drive their own analysis from reports through sorting, filtering, charting and being able to export their work.

Cons

FOCUS itself has a steep learning curve that is very dependent on the capabilities of the entity that is going to implement and use it. Your environment will carry a heavy influence on how successful the implementation will be. Management will need a measure of patients and need to invest in users to learn, documents and carry that intelligence throughout the organization.

Favorite & most capable tool for BI analysts

The best package for BI developers, no other tools are needed.

Pros

WebFOCUS offers a lot of customization when it comes to reporting, dashboards, infoapps and the platform support FOCUS, javascript, HTML, python and other languages. In our organization, we do not need any other BI platform since WebFOCUS gives Us all the tools we need to make analytics delivered to our community.

Cons

It may take few months to learn WebFOCUS as a developer since there are many things developer should know before creating reporting/analytics. Although after that time a developer will find almost infinite ways of customizing reports as soon as they learn how the WebFOCUS works and executes procedures. GUI could be improved but each year WebFOCUS improves it a lot with updates.

Not user friendly, terrible customer support, limited customization

My experience has been to find ways to use the product as little as possible. By that meaning using it for getting basic data on the back end, then coding the front end of the reports myself. This way I am able to create the reports and dashboards with more functionality, modern styling and have them be responsive for viewing on multiple platforms (Desktop, tablet, phone).

Pros

This works good for the average adhoc user that will doing basic, single database reporting. The forum they have has been very helpful. I have found out more answers from other users than I have been able to find in their docs or from their tech support.

Cons

There are so many bugs in this product. I have multiple cases open with their tech support that have been open for months. I currently have a case that has been open for 9 months that they still cannot figure out. Usually the response is something along the lines of that it will be fixed in a later release. Then, in my experience, when updating to a later release the one bug is fixed, but more are introduced and we're back to square one of rebuilding our reports that have broken during the upgrade. Product lags when trying to do complex queries over multiple databases. Documentation is very weak and vague, if/when you can actually any documentation at all.

WebFOCUS as the go-to app for data dissemination

My users throughout the state of New Jersey are finally buying into the fact they can create 'what-if' scenarios and modelling with the data I'm preparing for them.

Pros

Accessibility to data regardless of where it is stored. Easeat which to disseminate the reports I generate. Ease of use of the Security Package whereby I can allow or disallow access to data, folders or a single call of a report.

Cons

We seem to always be on the cutting edge of the product and what we want to do. Sometimes it seems like we are the first to come up with a particular question. But an answer is always forthcoming even if it is not instantaneous.

Information Builders is great!

Overall, IB has been very helpful to deliver our products. Customer support is great as well.

Pros

I love the customized visualizations and the ability to disconnect reports from the server to send to member hospitals.

Cons

Sometimes it is not as flexible as I would hope. Using the indocument analytics, I cannot always create the visualizations or filters I would like.

Powerful tool for visualizations

We are creating scheduled reports, portals, dashboards, data feeds, and spreadsheets. Our business partners are empowered to do most of the work themselves rather than relying on IT.

Pros

We constantly push this product to its limits. The web interface combined with AppStudio allows us to do things many other similar products can't. The customer service is top notch. Occasionally it shows its roots from the mainframe product but they are constantly looking to improve.

Cons

My biggest issue with the software is the scheduling tool. It is great for individuals but not really an enterprise tool.

Daily executive reporting made easy!

Pros

This product allowed us to easily build reporting dashboards for reporting on critical data points during the pandemic, which allows our executive team to make critical decisions quickly.

Cons

There was a brief ramp up period for my BI developed, but he was able to take the necessary training to get up and running.

Right product for the job

Used across the University to complete data needs.

Pros

Able to report against many different data types in one integrated tool. Data output can be displayed many different ways (aggregate or summarized in detail or graphically). Easily being distribute multiple ways.

Cons

End users need a good base of knowledge to do more advanced features. Easy to learn but does take some time.

Great enterprise reporting tool

We have been using IBI for several years now, it is a great tool and we are still scratching the service with its functionality.

Pros

We looked at a lot of tools but they would not have been a fully functioning enterprise solution like IBI is.

Cons

It is a lot to learn! And we are barely scratching the surface on its capabilities.

WebFocus from BA Perspective

WebFocus helps my team assist customers with visualizations and analytics for their business needs. Overall experience is great.

Pros

The ease to add and remove multiple data sets.

Cons

Steep learning curve when trying to convert the data to visualizations.

Real feedback based on real life experience

Customer support is really great. Nice people.

Pros

OK, this will sound like a promo - but this is real feedback based on real life experience using various BI and FR tools over the years. Over the last decade Finance/BI has inherited many ops tasks as traditional IT departments push to migrate BI and financial reporting to “user self-service”. (Keeps their headcount down and mine up!) WebFocus has all the ‘sexy’ stuff that software vendors are promoting. Great, but I am a production shop and 90% of what we do is just day-to-day critical. WebFocus provides the three critical components I need from a BI software package: InfoAssist helps us manage through staffing churn. I don’t need to hire BI staff with WebFocus experience as most Individuals with any kind of BI experience can launch InfoAssist and figure it out themselves. Reportcaster: My staff can manage standard scheduled report distribution in Reportcaster. Once set up it’s easy to maintain. Speed: “Instant” graphs and analytics is today’s expectation. We’ve got more data than we have time to do report development, so WebFocus gets us to the data for all the one-off reports and charts.

Cons

This is not really a con, but a heads up. WebFocus is a robust BI tool. Setup and security requires your IT Department's "buy in" to support the tool. Yes, it's a BI reporting package, and it can be used for just that, but WebFocus can do so much more - and sooner or later you'll want the 'more'

WebFOCUS is a workhorse. It handles the needs of our entire spectrum of users.

This software meets all of the enterprise reporting needs for our organization. From singe-click users to our most advanced super users.

Pros

WebFOCUS does it all in an single platform. From an entry-level single-click user to our most advanced super users running their own ad hoc queries. It is our enterprise reporting solution, and almost every department in our company uses it in one way or another. It is almost unheard of when we run into a reporting challenge that WebFOCUS cannot handle. It is extremely flexible and robust.

Cons

Flexibility comes with complexity, that is a fact of life, and a fact of this software too. When diving into more advanced features, there is a certain level of necessary complexity. Customizations are also a bit of a trap when it comes to future upgrades. We have learned the hard way that just because we can do something a certain way doesn't necessarily mean we should. A fully customized application will work beautifully in the current version, but will make upgrades an uncomfortable experience. Lastly, the GUI for WebFOCUS has not always been the sleekest visually. This is rapidly changing for the better, but historically has lagged behind other reporting vendors.

The suite of products is great, learning curve can be quite high.

Large insights to data trends which were otherwise not noticed. Efficiencies have been made to daily/weekly/monthly tasks by using excel sync's to bring in refreshed data that we couldn't not have mapped into our warehouse. By using this tool, we have created a very efficient report writing team that is spread across our organization and are data experts at an individual department level structure.

Pros

It's a wide open platform with endless customization options. We have yet to run into an issue that was not able to be met by the work done in webfocus. They're online presence is wonderful for tech support and forums which often find us most of our solutions to any sticky situations.

Cons

So many individual pieces in this suite of products, that it's sometimes confusing as to what you actually own, what you need to buy and what you are getting by with. Upgrades happen quite often, so if you don't have a dedicated system engineer to devote time for upgrades, you'll be bringing in your system engineer that was provided by IBI.

The Better Game in Town with room to expance

I can produce operational and financial reports much easier and quicker than the groups that manage and develop the source systems the data comes from.

Pros

It's very easy to connect different data sources and start mapping your data and building intelligent reports. I haven't found a relevant data source, yet, that WebFOCUS can't connect to. The latest versions of the product make user interaction extremely intuitive and put a lot of power in the hands of end users to create their own dashboards and reports from managed data sources. With the full AppStudio development tool, extremely complicated scenarios can be analyzed and developed by your developers and published to the users.

Cons

Until very recently, there was not a good method for Source Control of WebFOCUS content. For any company that has their BI fall under SOX Audit controls, this might be a little difficult to deal with.

Build Robust and Easy-to-use Customer Portals

Pros

The company I work for has many existing reports in OLAP and other formats. They purchased WebFocus to begin building out and modernizing client portals, with more visually-appealing charts and graphs in dashboard layout. On top of this, my team and I were all brand new to WebFocus. Within a few months of implementing WebFocus, and partnering with a couple of WebFocus consultants (whom are top-notch by the way), we successfully launched our first client portal on the WebFocus platform. I joined the team earlier this year, so I wasn't involved in the evaluation process, but from what I hear of the other tools that were evaluated, we would have already surpassed their capabilities early on in our project. From what I have seen so far, WebFocus is a very powerful BI tool, with probably more capabilities than we have would ever think of using. We've yet to reach the limits of the tool, and believe me when I say that we have tried.

Cons

The WebFocus format and language is a little different than what I already knew. So there is a learning curve. However, with some training, and the will to learn, it gets much easier in a few months.

The strength is in mining data

The main use for me is to create dashboards. Dashboards being data represented in a graphical interface for quick-hitting analysis, especially by C-level personnel. WebFocus has its own proprietary language, which is basically a version of SQL. This knowledge can help when it comes to constructing more detailed queries that cannot be achieved with the GUI. One of the strengths of WebFocus is that it can integrate with numerous DBs, including relational and hierarchical DBs. I've used Focus (the MF and PC version prior to WebFocus) and have seen this tool evolve into its current incarnation which is suited for the internet (web page) world.

Pros

The focus (no pun) on grabbing data and messaging it into meaning information. Specifically, the tools to achieve that are in one place and helpful in constructing pages to analyze data, such as dashboards. I like that I can take a deeper dive into queries by crafting my own WebFocus queries (knowledge of Focus 4GL required).

Cons

WebFocus does take some training to put together meaningful reports and dashboards. Some aspects are easy to use without any exposure, but IBI promotes their training courses for a reason. This may be a con in that most people expect to create content immediately. To get to the next level, you will need to take more courses. Some tools are hidden and could be more straight-forward.

Reliable, Robust, User Friendly, and Flexible.

Robust Reports and Charts; Business users can easily develop reports

Pros

- As an IT professional, I find WebFOCUS to be a powerful reporting tool which meets very diversified demands within my organization. - Allows non-developers to quickly create reports and charts without a lot of technical know how. - The applications can handle processing large amounts of data in a short period of time. - Technical support staff is knowledgeable and turnaround time for resolving issues is excellent. - Creating ad hoc reports in InfoAssist allows business users to quickly analyze data.

Cons

Have experienced a few hiccups when upgrading from one release to another, but with the assistance of their technical support team, we were able to resolve issues promptly.

WebFOCUS 8x

As a long-time developer and dev manager, I have a very high opinion of WebFOCUS. It's complexity is due to it's depth and breadth. I know that no matter what challenge my team encounters, we can solve it with WebFOCUS.

Pros

My team at a federal agency has used Information Builders platforms for more than 10 years to manage and report on financial data. The single biggest advantages that the WebFOCUS products share is their flexibility and adaptability. The ability to create anything and connect to everything is huge.

Cons

The flip-side to WebFOCUS's tremendous flexibility is its maturity and complexity. The platform has existed for so long and attempts to accomplish so much that the ramp-up for new developers can feel daunting.

Great product, very flexible and powerful

Pros

I like the fact that WebFocus is able to solve a lot of problems. It is the type of reporting tool where if you want to accomplish something, there is a way to do it in WebFocus, complicated or simple. Email distribution is by far one of my favourite, we can customize reports to be sent out, embed them in emails, make multiple attachments. Active PDF is also very powerful too.

Cons

Ease of use is a main struggle point for the software. I find its hard to teach a new user how to use the power user tools at this point in time. Having attended their user conference, I have seen some new improvements and redesigns in the next release that will change my mind on this point. Ease of use is very important for user adoption.

WebFocus is easy to use, powerful, and intuitive

WebFocus has all the features that our small/medium sized company needs. We've been able to build complex dashboards/portals, and the tools are easy to work with.

Pros

The ability to easily switch between a graphical interface and a text editor. I usually start the build of a new report with the GUI. It allows me to see what I'm building as I add columns, titles, and features. However, when I'm troubleshooting a report, I tend to use the text editor, which allows me to look directly at the code. When working in the editor, changes can be made quickly, and large chunks of code can easily be cut and pasted to expand the functionality of the report.

Cons

The software is fine. If I can a con, it would be some of the junior customer service folks that weren't able to resolve certain issues. Overall, however, the senior folks at Info. Builders have a wealth of knowledge.

WebFOCUS

Pros

WebFOCUS is a flexible BI platform that allows developers to empower basic and power user internally and externally.

Cons

The frequent upgrades that break older content

Information Builders Builds Relationships

Pros

Information Builders is not just a company and it doesn't sell just products and services. They are a partner who ensures that you succeed and they will not talk you into a product that you don't need. When you have a question or concern someone is always more than willing to help you out... with enthusiasm and competence. The product is dynamic and robust to ensure that the business needs are met - technically as well as in usability.

Cons

Information Builders was a little slow to innovate into the 21st century until recently. The past version of WebFOCUS felt like it was still in the early 2000's, but with the release of WebFOCUS 8 they are relevant and innovating the in analytics space.

Feature Rich & East to Use

We are helping our clients with modern ways to look at their data to make real time business decisions that continue to propel their businesses to the next level. WebFocus has provided every thing we have needed to create what our company calls raving fans.

Pros

From self-service to complicated analytic reporting needs, the WebFocus platform has fulfilled every need our company has demanded. The transition of modernizing our business platform as the WebFocus platform advances has been relatively smooth process.... and they have always been right there to guide and help with any difficulties we have encountered.

Cons

I do not have any cons with my experiences with WebFocus.

WebFocus Review

I have worked with WebFOCUS for almost 20 years and I have watched it grow into the tool it is today.

Pros

I like that you can combine data from all sources into one single report or chart and the user will not know how many data sources were used or notice any lag time from retrieval

Cons

The composers still crash when working in them and it is not easy to modify a page once it is created. Also you cannot get to the code behind and there is still old control code left over after they have been removed from the pages. This can cause browsers to get confused and pages to slow down when loading

WebFocus 8

IBI has allowed us to allow our clients to peer into our billing system, to give information around collection data, member account demographics, etc. Providing that transparency to our clients assist greatly in the very important relationship between ABC Financial and our clients.

Pros

The full suite on the platform allows us so many options for our clients, including standardized visualizations, custom/self-service visualization options, and modern automated options through ReportCaster (In-document analytics, InfoGraphics, etc.).

Cons

At the moment, there is nothing our business needs that IBI cannot provide.

Information Builders is truly a partner for success. They are always willing to work with you to implement successful solutions and continuously listen to specific customer needs. Many of the features in new releases are directly related to customer reque

Information Builders is an innovative company and their products continue to improve. Given the success, experience and age of the company, they have proven to be a trustworthy business partner.

Pros

The WebFOCUS product can handle most if not all reporting requests, functionality is wide spread. If the product needs to be improved then IBI will partner with you to find a solution and/or improve the offering with new features.

Cons

Depending on the user the learning curve can be a bit high; users should start with the basics and build from there. Even with that though, a user should be able to gain momentum by having success early on.

WebFocus - a heavier, more robust SQL

AppStudio is so much better than DevStudio. I can see many benefits to using this software. We allow users to pull exactly the data they need without having to write or understand SQL. This makes out backend more secure, and makes the whole process smoother for the user.

Pros

We use AppStudio to create and maintain procedures (.fex). I really like the diversity in commands. You are able to join and manipulate data more than with raw SQL. I also like the option to use their GUI or their raw text editor.

Cons

It is confusing. Although they allow use of a GUI to make the software "easier" to use, there are many things that can ONLY be accomplished using the base FOCUS code. In addition, many times you have to pass over the data multiple times in order to actually get what you want out of it.

Best Customer Support in the Industry

Pros

Fantastic, involved, motivated customer support team Infographics are the best new feature to come along in quite awhile Reporting Server is very fast - generally sub-second query time for a lot of queries, regardless of data source; server time is also minimal Relatively easy to host multiple, separated applications with separate user groups and roles

Cons

Data adapter management AppStudio software still needs an overhaul - unintuitive and ungainly (3GB???) AppStudio licensing (vs Reports Developer) - reduce that to one version

Review of WebFocus from SLGA

Rapid development helps quick delivery to upper management. More graph library and functions would be great since I do a lot of graphs.

Pros

New IA features and ease of use. New page designer reduced development time and create a standardized look and feel of a professional page.

Cons

Building business view and metadata can be more streamline. Changes made in one area should be cascade down to other related view without having to remember to change things in multiple places. More automated process to build a view.

it is an excellent company

I was able to create fast dashboards. I become a very experience developer using the app studio.

Pros

I like the new look of App Studio . it can do many powerful things. I loved the html composer and the easy way to create the new portals. In a few minutes you can create powerful dashboards.

Cons

infoassist since I did not used it so often. Sometimes the workarounds do not work. Most of the things are documented but sometimes some specific things we need to search in google to find the answer. sometimes takes too long to solve an issue.

Mixed.. We have evangelists and others that would prefer not to use WebFOCUS.

turning data into information for business

Pros

I think the operational BI aspect of WebFOCUS stands out. We like how the visualization aspects are growing and the interface is getting a more modern look and feel. I think you can do a lot with WebFOCUS.

Cons

Had many people complain about performance of the environment. Sometimes upgrades are tough and we have a lower confidence level that everything is going to work. People can find WebFOCUS hard to use and it can be hard to find WebFOCUS developers.

I've been "In FOCUS sine 1933" and have used it extensively since then.

We can do that in WebFOCUS... Better than anything else...

Pros

Innovation! The way things that are complicated are being made easy and the easy things are being automated. ... YES!, We can do that in WebFOCUS!

Cons

Really? What do I like LEAST? Well, I guess: keeping up with all the new features as the innovation continues a fast as it does... That's more of a challenge . BUT IBI provides great help , support, and training to help us overcome those challengers.

A Very Powerful Platform with excellent support

We have made extensive use of dashboards, reports and business critical analytics decision making processes. It has truly made a positive impact on our bottom line.

Pros

The platform is very flexible and deep in capabilities. There has been no problem that our company has not been able to solve with it.

Cons

The self service capabilities of previous versions have been more like developer tools and not intuitive for business users to work with. This seems to be resolved in the latest version soon to be released.

The tool does an exceptional job of delivering information to many users.

Enabled a transformation of our information delivery to deliver key information to business users in an efficient, governed, and quality manner.

Pros

Very scale-able and robust - it provides a solid platform for BI & Analytics Report building tools are fairly easy to use, yet powerful Software support team is excellent

Cons

Tremendous flexibility in deployment can lead to challenges in initial set-up and in ensuring multiple environment configurations are consistently applied.

Webfocus

Pros

It is very user friendly as you can drag and drop for beginners If you are more interested in doing the code manually you can do that as well Customer service is great there is always willing to help you (I recommend going premium! Twice as fast) Great functionality and are always adding more functionality to the product

Cons

Can be very buggy sometimes Can be slowed sometimes compared to other reporting tools

Good for Dashboards

It is a great tool for building more complex reports and dashboards. Would just like to see more resources and learning documents.

Pros

The integration of HTML and SQL reporting capabilities helps for creating great, dynamic dashboards and reports. I love the ability to add parameters and criteria to my dashboards and make everything look sleek and easy to use.

Cons

If there is something I do not know how to do, it is difficult to follow the resources or troubleshoot the problems I am experiencing. I also would love to see improved error reporting that better specifies your errors, especially in SQL your code (when your procedure will not run).

BNY Mellon Webfocus conversion

it has been a good experience to learn about distributed environment after years of working on the mainframe

Pros

recently converted mainframe jobs to webfocus environment. Most existing jobs were easily ported over to distributed environment will few changes. However, this gave us an opportunity to do some well needed tuning on jobs that have been running on mainframe for 15-20 year. Tuning has increase efficiency and speed in new Linux environment and we are incurring cost savings by moving application to a distributed environment over IBM mainframe

Cons

i currently have no negative comments to make

Great customer support and a tool that catched up significantly to other tools

Pros

Broad functionalities - more than other tools Very close customer support and relations Look and feel is now in the new version modern and slick Faster development and release cycles results in shorter wait time for new functionalities

Cons

Because its less known than the big tools executives might not buy in into the tool Maybe still has some legacy "issues" Still takes some bigger efforts to upgrade to newer versions

user friendly tool, good customer service

comparing with other reporting tool, I like this one most, highly recommended.

Pros

techsupport is great. Care about their customer. nice and easy tool to build reports. our tech support and account manager always reaching out to us and asking if we need any tech support and making recommendation.

Cons

only online training session available now, hope it can open group session or labs in this location. Also for the summit, prefer location in Florida.

Webfocus from a developers perspective

I have had a good run over 30 years using their products. I find them to be the best tool to address various business scenarios using IT.

Pros

The available features and the ease of which they can be used to build a report application.

Cons

The cost to maintain. The various adapters needed to support in house applications quickly add up.

Great tools, awesome customer service and support, obvious IBI is continuing to improve products.

Insight, reports, Dashboards.

Pros

Modern UI, taking the complexity out of the process of ingesting data and allowing business users to create reports, charts, and dashboards to gain insight into their business.

Cons

multiple tools to create BI solutions, although IBI is on a path to consolidate tool set. Would also like to see more accelerators for the various business units to help accelerate adoption in our company.

WebFOCUS in an Enterprise Environment.

We use WebFOCUS to primarily pull reporting and dashboard data from our Data Repository. Our secondary use is an an application framework to build out webapps against our data infrastructure for multiple purposes.

Pros

WebFOCUS works well for our Business Intelligence applications and needs. We have used it as a flexible reporting and application framework for many years.

Cons

Updating major releases can be time consuming for a larger environment.

As our business grows, WebFOCUS scales with us

This software is everywhere in our organization, almost every employee uses or is affected by WebFOCUS.

Pros

Scalability and customer service are amazing. This software spans our entire enterprise to run the latest visuals to creating excel reports that automatically distribute.

Cons

Visualization on the browser needs good memory or it lags. I would love it if upgrades were really simple and i can use the new features quickly.

Reliable for Years

Migration from IBM mainframe using DB2 to a Unix platform using Oracle was extremely simple, most reports required only a two line change.

Pros

I have been using one version or another of Focus for over 30 years. While the core product has evolved and improved and even migrated across platforms ... the core reports still work with very little updates required,

Cons

Reporting server has a static font - which is proportional.

Compared to prior versions it is becoming easy to work with new versions

Pros

Webfocus is a robust tool than can very well handle high data volumes for large and transnational reporting Most recent version 8.x onwards the tool is showing capabilities of good BI tool

Cons

BI dashboards and charts needs more flexibility to develop (still not Comparable with leading Dash boarding tools). Power users still not able to work independently .

Longer learning curve, but great benefit yields when there is a clear understanding of the product

Flexibility, opportunities to combine multiple data sources, near limitless possibilities when you have a clear understanding of the FOCUS language.

Pros

Flexible, extensible, the product provides many opportunities to transform data in almost limit ways.

Cons

Longer learning curve, because of desperate setups among user bases there is a need to target training with better respect to the environment that the client is in.

Michigan State Police utilizes WebFOCUS, love the environment. We are expanding every year.

Pros

The Customer Support, IB has the best. Never have seen any other company so focused on customers. From sales, so systems, to project management, to development, etc - The Best.

Cons

None - Our issues have not been with the software, it's our existing technology, management, servers, etc within the State's Dept of Technology that hinders and creates issues with our software.

I have used WF for many years now and feel that each release is better and easier to use.

Pros

The diversity... the GUi for the metadata, Infoassist and App Studio report writing options, ability to write code or use the ever-improving GUI. Also the ability to connect to various database platforms. Easy to use Portal developer.

Cons

I feel the early releases of the software can be QA'd better to catch some of the defects up front before released to the general public.

A great product and a great company

We have used IBI for more than 8 years and have never regretted our decision. They have been not just a vendor, but a true business partner who cares about the success of their clients.

Pros

User friendly, comprehensive functionality, incredible customer support, great annual user conference, extensive free online training videos, new functionality is added continually including from requests from customers.

Great BI tool

Easy dissemination of data and insight accross the organisation. Lots of capabilities.

Pros

It is very flexible. You can do almost anything. Very scalable and stable. User acceptance was easy.

Cons

It might take longer to develop a report. Developers require some tool knowledge. There are a lot of features, so it is not always obvious to pick the right one for a specific requirement.