Road Map

It used to be that a company could give a road map for the next 5 years and be confident that it was very close to what the company would do. Even 10 years was possible for at least a general guideline. But to do that today and pretend it's locked in stone would be disengenuous at best, and lying at worst. I'm not going to do that.

Yet with no guidance we're all left wondering what will happen tomorrow and it is impossible to plan around that. It is also unfair to ask people to buy our software with no assurance about what we will be doing tomorrow. We owe you not just a guess, but reasonable assurances as to what we will be doing 5 years from now.

So let's start with the basics. We provide a great reporting solution and we will continue to do so. This is what the company is built around. Even if we ship a new product that is a very different part of that market, Windward Reports is a solid successful product that solves a real need for most companies. We will continue to not only support it, but increase it's functionality.

As to what those new features will be, there are three primary guidelines that we use. These guidelines are how we determine what will and what will not be added to future versions:

1. K.I.S.S. – we will keep it simple. The world has plenty of reporting systems where report design and the programming to call it is complex & difficult. The world does not need one more complex system. So retaining simplicity is key.
2. What our customers ask us for. The simple answer here is what customers vote up in IDEAS. But it is more than that. It is the conversations we have with our customers {link to Shirley's blog entry here} and what comes out of that. Many times the big ideas come not from a vote or a blog entry or a comment – they come out of a discussion.
3. What we come up with. To a large degree this is a repeat of item (2) because our employees present their ideas through the exact same mechanism as our customers (see Office Live and AutoTag).

So what will we see in the near and intermediate future? In the near future (this summer) we definitely will see:

• A better system to teach AutoTag when first using it.
• A full macro language for most tags. This macro language is very similar to that for Excel and will allow complex processing for a tag.
• A means to display tags in Excel using shorthand as we do in Word.
• Complete refactoring of the PDF builder which will allow using the latest version of iText, proper support of Arabic, and fixing a number of minor bugs.
• Supporting XLS & XLSX files as a datasource. (These will look like a single table in a SQL database.)
• Generate report output directly to a printer.
• Advanced support in the SQL Wizard (primarily auto-joins) for Oracle, DB2, & firebird. (We already have this for Sql Server, MySql, & PostgreSQL.)

Before the end of the year we will probably see the following. The items below we will present in detail on our website and ask any & all to comment about their usefulness and the design we have in mind. We will probably include webinars with open discussion (and we will record them and make that public too). With that said, I will be very surprised if any of these are shot down.

• An improved charting sub-system. This would include prettier charts, adding gauges, a better UI for selecting data, tying into Excel charts (both for design and aoutput), and the ability to call a 3^rd party system to design & render the charts.
• A switch statement eliminating the need for nested if/else/… constructs.
• Dashboards (which we mostly do except for the lack of gauges in our charts). Parts of this might be a new product – if we have a mechanism for live dashboards and/or a what if system like Xcelcius.
• A full docgen system built on sharepoint and/or Office Live. (If both, it would run on either, not require both.) This would probably be a new product.

And then there's long term. I think we will create some kind of ad-hoc query system that would then optionally tie to our reporting system. But the big driver of what we do after the above will be driven by what people see as both useful and possible as they start making use of the features we are adding over the next 6 months. So tell me, what do you want to see next?