ibi

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.