Hi! I've made use of JasperReports and Pentaho Reporting.
Pentaho is great for end users who prefer the Crystal Reports (GUI Report building) method. It has it's quirks and is a bit inflexible quite often but it's the easiest tool by far for an end user to use to create reports. JasperReports I find to be more flexible but I find it better suited to custom report development by a software developer. Just my 2c. Regards, Antoine -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] on behalf of Soren Aalto Sent: Sun 9/16/2007 10:17 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [CTJUG Forum] OSS BI/Reporting - Jaspersoft, BIRT (or other) experiences? I'm at a fairly high pain point here with the volume of MIS/reporting requests and how we (don't) handle them through ad-hoc means. Currently we have a couple of people who do SQL queries...mostly using a JSP tool I wrote (kind of the same as Oracle isqlplus which our vendor removed from our system to keep us from knowing too much). Anything that isn't doable in a single query is - pieced together by hand - somebody writes an adhoc program. A problem is that "somebody" is now me -- mostly writing stuff in Groovy/Groovlets/GSP, some JSP stuff, some Jython as well. We migrated from an in-house system to a 3rd party admin system (Student records/Finance/HR...) about 18 months ago and our former Natural/Adabas developers are no longer functioning programmers. I'm trying to push everybody in the Java (+ JVM scripting languages a la Groovy) direction, but it's a slow process/steep learning curve, far removed from Natural/Adabas... I realise we need help -- primarily on the Reporting/BI front, and also on the programming front...but I also want to try and stay with an OSS/web friendly technology strategy here. Does anybody out there have experience with OSS stuff like Jaspersoft/Jasper Reports and/or Eclipse/BIRT? I looked at these things long ago and wasn't convinced they'd help because the focus seemed mainly to be on presentation/reporting, but the thing that attracts me is the web viewers that would allow our staff to publish reports on the web easily. I also looked at OpenReports, which looked promising, but I didn't get it working...some issues with log4j. And I've seen Pentaho...but that's about it. I'm mostly interested in: 1) a decent OSS solution for reporting and/or BI that publishes stuff on the web easily, or 2) good reasons why I shouldn't look at (1) (like, you have tried to go this route and have ended up going with a commercial solution like Cognos...Microsoft Dynamics/Navision/whatever they call it now...Crystal Reports...Discoverer?) 3) Anybody who does consulting in this line who also could shore up our not-really-happening Java/Web/OSS friendly strategy. I'm posting this on a JUG list on the other side of the country -- because I haven't been able to see any life on Dbnjug and...I just tried again and the SAJUG website isn't there. CTJUG is the only JUG with any mail traffic in the country. -- Soren Aalto Director: ICT University of Zululand --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CTJUG Forum" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/CTJUG-Forum For the ctjug home page see http://www.ctjug.org.za -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
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