Industry Standard Ad-Hoc Reporting Solution

March 2, 2009 3:03 PM

I'm looking for a standard solution to provide minimal ad-hoc reporting functionality. I am an inexperienced sysadmin who spends a large portion of his day writing similar reports for my users. I am looking for a solution that will allow me to publish reports that can be modified by non technical users. My primary goal is to find the most "industry standard" solution, so that I know that it will have plenty of community support. More than just finding a good solution, I'd really like to find a good solution with a recognized name behind it. Flexibility and ease of use are my secondary interests.
posted by Gusy to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Crystal Reports/Business Objects has name recognition in this space. You can create reports and publish them to a web portal so your users can get to them easily. Business Objects also has a tool called Web Intelligence which is a web-based only reporting tool.
posted by slepore09 at 3:11 PM on March 2, 2009

How big is your organization? How many users are you looking to support? Crystal Reports and/or Business Objects are big players, like slepore09 says, but I think they are geared towards large organizations.
posted by cabingirl at 3:13 PM on March 2, 2009

I suspect many smaller orgs just use a directory of a few read-only text files as templates, and fill those in.
posted by zippy at 3:44 PM on March 2, 2009

I just left a job where we setup quite a large Cognos install. Powerful, but ease of use is questionable when starting from scratch when there was no training purchased. And sort of expensive. Someone else I know has had success with Pentaho.

For a small org, and some people will puke upon reading this, MS Access works fairly well. I was forced to use in some situations in the past where something web based was not an option. A well setup mdb file with the right queries and reports can be made pretty dummy proof. The user opens the file, responds to a few prompts, and gets their report.
posted by austinetsu at 5:17 PM on March 2, 2009

If your reports are simple and your users are good with spread sheets you can just publish your data as CSV(comma separated values) and the they can do what they want with them.
posted by bdc34 at 5:47 PM on March 2, 2009

If you're using Oracle databases, Discoverer is worth a look.
posted by wheat at 12:24 PM on March 3, 2009