Informer

Overall: My overall experience with Informer has been great! There are a few tweaks that I feel need to be made and periodic glitching but other than that everything has gone smoothly. When teaching my end users how to navigate and use the product everything is very self explanatory and I hear nothing but amazing comments and compliments about Informer once they get the hang of it. I would highly recommend Informer to other universities and organizations that would benefit from using it.

Pros: -User friendly -Allows data to be easily manipulated to create a report that shows exactly what you are looking for. -The ability to assign Users to Teams and set permissions/access for those users so that they can or can not edit or view other Teams Datasets. -Useful tools and features that allow you to alter the formatting of the data. -Easily being able to create a Job and schedule them to run on specific days and times. -Being able to use Datasources to view the fields within each mapping as well as being able to hide those fields that you do not want end users to use. -Creating custom expressions for those fields that you need within a specific mapping. -Amazing visually and gives you a great end result.

Cons: -Can be glitchy at times (ex: When editing a Dataset and organizing the columns the way you want them it tends to undo the organization when you go back into the Dataset to edit it). -Not being able to share a Dataset with a specific user. -Even as an Admin/Super User I find that I need to change the ownership of a Dataset owned by another user in order to edit the Dataset. Without changing the ownership of the Dataset over to myself I am still able to edit the Dataset but they tend to glitch and will either not show data within the field I am adding for them or the query will fail to run. However, when I change the ownership of the Dataset to myself and make the same changes it works perfectly. -In Datasources it would be nice to have a column within the mappings that shows a description of the fields that end users are choosing so that there is less confusion.

Overall: We have had some difficulties setting up Informer 5, but the support has been very good, both knowledgeable and timely.

Pros: I like that it's an affordable tool for a smaller company. It is intuitive to set up reports and dashboards and being able to report across multiple data sources is key.

Cons: There are features in Informer 4 that I need (comma-separated filters), so until that exists I have to use both Informer 4 and Informer 5. It would be better to be able to just use 5 for everything.

Overall: Excellent. Informer delivers the powerful, complicated reporting our data-hungry team needs. Our data is spread between several connected yet disparate systems, with different systems being in charge of different types of information (e-commerce is here, ERP is there, customer Source of Truth is SFDC) and Informer consumes and unifies it all in one application.

Pros: Our team is pulling data from 4x Postgres databases, Salesforce.com and a few legacy-export CSV files. The reports we create are complicated can contain as many of the above-mentioned sources as we need. If you like the flexibility of SQL and custom code, you can do that. If you want point-and-click, you may lose some of the most advanced function but can probably still get yourself some great charting.

Cons: You're going to need a few power users that are comfortable with basic Javascript or SQL to take full advantage of the software. Powerscripts and complex, multi-step build jobs are powerful but somewhat cumbersome, but they do deliver the flexibility to manipulate a report in so many ways.