Halo Review
Pros
The ease of creating dashboards and reporting and the transparency and self service of the Data Warehouse.
Cons
The amount of time the BI tool takes to load and the high cost of upgrading to more bandwidth on the server.
Halo is our answer to dozens of daily questions about our business!
Best reporting investment we have ever made! Great company to work with. Post support is unparalleled. Response and attention to our questions and issues is prompt and thorough. They keep adding enhancements and pre-programmed modules to keep us on the proactive side of daily business decisions!
Pros
Browser agnostic
Ease of accessibility for Remote employees
Scheduled reporting
Simple, varied Charting functionality
Flexibility of using several types of data sources to combine data in one view
Cons
Pane sizing - views with a lot of measures run out of real estate
Time Dimension response when changing from saved view default
Halo makes it easy for use to find to measure performance and find trends.
Halo software and support is great, gives you a good sense of understanding the concepts and functionality. I love it's flexibility and easy to use.
Pros
This software is fast, smarter, and helps our business organize data. No matter how unrefined our data is, this software was created for the purpose to stay organize and track trends that helps companies make faster and smarter decisions.
Cons
Halo offers limited customization. It can be a bit challenging using the integration to other systems. Not user friendly for sync integration. If you pay lower price, then you will get what you paid for it's true functionality.
Response from Halo
Thank you, Alicia! Please let us know if we can assist with your customization requirements.
Sincerely,
The Halo Team
Highly usable for programmers and executives alike.
Pros
Prism is powerful and highly customizable. Source data is easily readable in SQL Server. The software is continuously evolving. Service top notch; a quick email asking how to accomplish something is often responded to within the hour.
Cons
A few nuances that have workarounds or functions that aren't intuitive, especially in Source. For some offhand examples: Ctrl+S doesn't save a project. You can't add a SQL Expression field if the datasource is Access (without fiddling with the source fields). Can't delete a range out of the processing log. I think there are occasions when right-clicks don't do what I'd expect. Just really minor things that trip me up for a moment and I don't think about them again until next time.
HALO Review
As I don't have the kills in-house to complete a lot of the work currently, we've been leveraging the skills of the Darren. Darren is great at understanding what we're asking, and also looking at the bigger picture and offering options for things we hadn't even considered.
Moving forward, we'd eventually like to have training for myself and Lauren so we can start to do more of this work ourselves
Pros
It is a tool we've never had before within the company
Once understood, easy to use the date to see what we want to see
Graphical interface
Good update schedule each year
Cons
Speed of some views (however this is related to our server resource)
There are a lot of features for HALO, however we're only scratching the surface with this
Response from Halo
Thank you, Steve!
I manage and use Halo on a regular basis.
Pros
I'm a big advocate of Halo Source and use it to integrate lots of our disparate data sources. It was very easy to pick up and learn, after a few hours of training - I was up and running and continue to use it to this day. It's helped us significantly reduce our data integration and report authoring turnarounds. We're using it as a foundation to build our BI/A stack.
Cons
There's nothing I like least - the Halo team is fast and responsive and always keen on solving any and all issues we come across.
My Experience thus far
From the start of training to support afterward, I've been completely impressed. This product is honestly amazing. I have never seen a company provide the level of support with the almost instant response times from their support team. Not to mention the politeness and knowledge provided. Halo truly provides more than they advertise.
Pros
Ease of use - once you get into using it, you get hooked on what can be done.
Security - as an administrator I decide who sees what and at what level.
Prebuilt to my needs - haven't found what it can't do yet or what the great support team can't help us with.
Cons
What do I like least about this product. Well nothing so far. The only limitation when creating a View is your imagination.
Amazing BI tool
We implemented Halo for our Sales dashboards initially. It has already helped us to identify areas where we need to focus on increased gross profit or sales campaigns. We are implementing with inventory next which will be a very valuable tool.
Pros
I love Halo's flexibility and ease of use. It is very easy to create the dashboards and reports that you need. Additionally it is great to be able to drill down levels to see directly where the information is coming from. The automatic alerts and collaboration tools further enhance the product to make it very easy and relevant.
Awesome product!
Pros
It is easy to navigate and drill up or down to get information. This is a very powerful tool and allows the user to look at information in various different ways that would have taken much longer to put together manually.
Cons
So far, everything is working out great. We just need to get more data cubes added so that we can analyze additional aspects of the business.
Halo Rocks!
Pros
Great people to work with, easy and quick installation, super easy to use. Great ROI.
Cons
There is nothing to dislike about Halo. It's great software.
Good tool for analysis and decision making
I use the Halo BI to bring insights to the managers of our clients. The integration feature with ERPs and Maps are great. It's not just another vizual tool.
Pros
Good for any size of company, easy to implement, Prebuilt for ERP / CRM, Prebuilt templates for our industries and for our clients.
Cons
There is not a negative point
Halo exceeds all expectations and best of all, it is user-friendly and easy to use!
Halo offers a simple BI Toll, it is great for small companies or simple requirements. Offers a fair price point for services.
Pros
Halo has a great data combination of data manipulation, standardized validation process, and simple varied charts functionality mobility.
Cons
Time decision for data saving is a bit slower but it doesn't freeze which is a good thing. Works best for smaller corporation.
Response from Halo
Thank you, Maria! Please let us know if we can assist with optimizing the process time. :)
Sincerely,
The Halo Team
Useful
Pros
This software has a lot of nice features. The presentation of data is unique and easy to understand.
Cons
You may need to be training to use it, not so easy to use.
My Review about HALO
Pros
Prism is very user friendly and understandable. Very very dynamic when drilling around.
Cons
Duplicates data during ETL and Prism takes a long time when dealing with big data.
Halo Prism
The overall experience of this product has been very good and satisfying. It has 2 applications. The webportal and the etl tool. Both are very user friendly and easy to use and develop in.
Pros
The portal is very user friendly with lots of features. The ETL Tool is very good and easier to use than SSIS and other tools. Manu Ikkala has been a very knowledgeable and very prompt in his support.
Cons
The ability to show lots of measures against the time dimension
Response from Halo
Thank you, Laura!
Lot of Bang for the minimalist
Pros
Easy to answer complex questions with a minimal amount of work. The integrations into multiple data sources was a huge plus for us.
Cons
One of the only issues we had with Halo was the limited integration into a SDLC for building and managing code. The other one thing we would like to see is a change in licensing in regards to developer licenses.
Very happy with Halo
Pros
Very good balance between usability and functionality
Relatively simple for business analysts and computer literate users to "own" the cube side of things
Very easy for people with low/medium computer skills to analyse the data (presentation side of things)
Cons
I have nothing negative to say about either Halo Source or Halo Prism
First foray into BI
Good middle market platform with good support and training
Pros
Email functionality and cost effectiveness
Cons
Cost of licenses for power users and lack of intuitiveness as self-service platform
ABC Review
Pros
Low maintenance and very good response time by Halo when needed.
Cons
Annual maintenance fee and the cost to implement a new cube.
Ease Of Use
Pros
How easy it is to create a dashboard by dragging and dropping items. Drilling for the data is very easy and takes a matter of seconds.
Cons
Need more formatting control in regards to percentages, currency, and other misc things. Some charts do not present things easily.
Outstanding software
Pros
Halo is one software you need to complete optimize your business. It's data report are simple to understand.
Cons
It may be a little bit difficult using the software at the beginning, but with practice it begins to make sense.
Halo has a simple and intuitive interface for the end user.
It has several pre-built connectors, which made it much easier to obtain the data of the systems used by our operation.
Pros
It has a great training team, which allows quick implementation with results with less cost and time.
All of my data in one quick view
We are starting to use Halo and we are excited with the results and possibilities that it brings us. It is certainly a key tool for rapid data analysis and decision making. We are moving towards an intensive use of Halo in several departments.
Pros
The Halo analytics tools are quite nice to use from building cubes to using the results. At various points, it is quite intuitive.
Halo Is a Good BI Tool for Not Needing High Skilled Front-End Users
We are spinning up cubes left and right to get at the data under JDE. We had no analytics/bi department prior to Halo. Now we are acting like a very advanced department with many subject areas being deployed each month. In just 6 months time, I now have Inventory, Account Ledger, Open Orders, and other things visualized and refreshing automatically everyday. Super excited about the future with this tool.
Pros
I like the flexibility it puts in the hands of the front end users. There is very little development time needed to "format charts" to be color schemes or certain column headers, etc. A front-end user can take on all that work in this tool. The main development is in building the cube and creating definitions on the backend for the facts, measures, and dimensions. Once that is done, the tool takes care of itself. I've used QlikView and Tabelau and Halo provides a nice consistent way of easy spin-up.
Cons
There is a steep learning curve in the beginning on all the settings associated with cubes, understanding processing order of operations, etc. Once you get a feel for that, things come together nicely. One major downfall is that everything "must" be in a cube with a time dimension. However, if you have non-time dimensional data you could just 'fake it', so it isn't a problem that can't be overcome. If you are used to using QlikView or something, where you can just load a dataset, you'll need to adapt to understand to use the front-end of Halo it needs to be in cube form.
Halo exceeds with lstest release of thier BI solution
Halo delivers a premium BI solution that is more that just easy to use, state of Art solution. The products time to value is fantastic you can have BI dashboards available in half the time of many competitors, and can be supported by users in the departments with little support from IT. We really were excited about the pre-built interfaces to many of the standard ERP and CRM solutions, along with Standard view templates by industry and company departments requirements.
With the most recent release they know have predictive analytics to allow you to forecast "look forward" trends based upon industry standard predictive models.
Pros
I feel the customer support and quality of the software is fantastic. we have gone through 6 upgrades without issues, and the support was working with us every step of the way, without any extra costs other than the annual maintenance. The other real benefit we experienced was the ability to import data from multiple sets of systems, integrate them into one cohesive data set, validate the data, and deliver actionable prebuild templates for our industry.
Cons
As Halo grows the software is getting better and better, they are investing heavily with industry experts and is becoming a Tier one supplier with more knowledge than just another BI platform.
It has taken a long time to implement, much of that is on us because of the way we decided to implement. I don't believe we were given sufficient advise in the beginning. We have since transferred to new account and project managers and things are moving along nicely. My advise would be to understand the software using simplified data first, once you have a good understanding of the extractions, transformations and how those translate through SQL to the BI tool, you are on your way to building a user friendly BI tool.