|
Summary
Inovis Trusted Link for Windows (TLW) is an EDI integration platform designed to help you take your EDI data and dynamically move it to your in-house ERP system or accounting system. Along with offerings from companies like Softshare, Sterling Commerce and EMANIO, Inovis is one of the leading providers of EDI solutions and while Inovis TLW is rich in capabilities and features, the price point and necessary support you will need makes it a hard to justify proposition for anyone below the enterprise arena in this tough economy. While Inovis TLW has advanced features and integrates nicely with the company’s associated VAN services, it’s clear that Inovis caters to an enterprise crowd and as a small or mid-sized business you will need to take that into consideration.
Strengths
TLW as a platform was not as easy to set up as competing solutions from EMANIO and Softshare, but with a little patience and some help from the company’s professional services staff you should have no problem becoming operational. Getting from “operational” to deployed, however, was another story. The capabilities of TLW are very high and well above what any small or mid-sized organization is going to need. TLW can translate from EDI to other popular formats including a number of supported database types, flat file, XML and text. The system can closely couple with the company’s VAN services but also requires a great deal of maintenance to keep running.
Limitations
TLW is a great product with a lot of key strengths – if you are a big company; for smaller organizations, however, TLW can be quite expensive and confusing to work with. Operating TLW successfully will mean purchasing a number of hours of professional services from the company and even continued maintenance can be quite daunting for a small shop. Invois doesn’t pull too many punches with pricing and it’s obvious very quickly that if you want a lot of features and a lot of capabilities you will need to pay dearly for them. Managing trading partners is is a relatively straight forward process, but working with the advanced features of the system can be confusing and an exercise in frustration. In Summary, while Inovis Trusted Link for Windows is a feature-rich product, it’s definitively not for the faint hearted, either in terms of difficulty or in terms of price.
Wish List
In future releases it would be great to see Inovis release a product that is more attractively priced and that perhaps sacrifices feature richness for ease of use and more affordability.
Product Ratings
The product ratings below reflect our evaluation of Inovis TLW with a rating score that ranges from 1 to 5, with 1 equaling “fail” and 5 being an “Excellent”. Our overall score for Inovis TLW is of 2.7 out of a total possible of 5.
| Product Area |
|
|
| Setup & Installation |
Installation of TLW proved to be a bit more challenging than we had hoped for, especially in setup and configuration |
2 |
| Interface |
The user interface for TLW is a bit confusing and forces you back to the manual one too many times |
3 |
| Features |
While rich in features, getting to them can be challenging and often frustrating |
3 |
| Ease of use |
Ease of use is the biggest Achilles heel of the product with an interface that is often overwhelmed by the sheer number of features in the product |
2 |
| Automation Capabilities |
While automation is a strong-suit of the product it achieves it through a convoluted process and time consuming effort |
3 |
| Integration capabilities |
Integrating with TLW is possible … but once again why would you want to pay this much for it? |
2 |
| Performance |
Performance is the products strong-suite, it beat all the other products handily save for the EMANIO product that came in second |
5 |
| |
Overall Score |
2.71 |
|
Our Team
About Team 
The strength of EDI Software Review is the individuals that make up the team. In fact, we believe that our team consists of a group of uniquely talented individuals. Each of the team members is an experienced consultant that is operationally savvy, demonstrating a deep levelof experience. Each member of the team has an intense commitment to board service and to working closely with the management teams of software companies to provide an unbias independant review. |
