October 22, 2012 at 7:28 am
I'm looking for a ad hoc reporting tool for our users. Probably the report builder or crystal report would be a little bit to complicated for our users, so I need something more basic. I supported previously a couple of software packages at my previous employeer where the tool was web based and had a step sequence where the user could create reports. First window, was a list of different views, then the fields selection, sorting, title, etc. the product was more intuitive than report builder or crystal reports. In addition to this intuitive interface, the available views for selection can be modified in a way that fields and tables names are more descriptive (rather than having desc_office it would be office's description). I thought it was part of ssrs but I don't seem to find any information about it. does anyone know a product like that?
October 22, 2012 at 8:17 am
Users can use shared datasets in SSRS. Depending on your budget SAP BusinessObjects is really nice for adhoc reports for end users as long as the admin builds the universes correctly. It's web based, you define the object names to be common business names and the users don't have to be familiar with joins or other structures in the database. It's drag and drop into a view area and a filter/where area and it's very intuitive. It's also very expensive.
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October 22, 2012 at 9:13 am
that is a great solution, I will definetely put it in my list to review. Pricing is an issue, I'll have to check with management when the time comes. Do you know of any other ad hoc queries product that are not as high end as this one?
October 22, 2012 at 9:51 am
One way of creating Ad Hoc reporting I've been looking at is to build a simple ASP.Net app where I create a list of options for the users to select from then it'll dynamically build the query, run it, and present it for them. Then they can download it to Excel to do whatever they want with it. For some of the canned queries where they just basically select the criteria on what records are returned I hope to go abit further and use SSRS to generate reports with more data like charts and custom highlighting based on various metrics.
So if you have some DotNet experience in your shop this might be an option.
October 23, 2012 at 12:21 am
You can also check out Cognos Analysis Studio. It has a Cognos Framework under it (sort of like the BO Universe) so it's basically drag and drop as well. Simple formulas can be used, just as in BO.
In my experience, Cognos isn't always the fastest solution and I don't think it's cheap either.
You can always check out Excel. Users are already familiar with it and if you have a SSAS cube they can easily build PivotTables. Check out PowerPivot as well, which is a free add-on for Excel and has much more power.
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