Business problem: reporting

        Hi folks. I have a question regarding an interesting problem that has surfaced at our company recently, involving on-line, web-based data reporting. Basically, one of the software products we develope, called Softshoe, is a large, web-based Human-Resources application which clients can use to track pretty much every part of the hiring process you could imagine - from when the job opens, to the applicants who are interviewed, to the one who is hired, to when he/she leaves the company. you get the idea. it also tracks individual recruiters and departments within HR. At this point, we are small enough that we maintain softshoe servers for each of our clients, but we are working towards the point where we could basically box it and hand it over to new clients when they buy it.

        Some of our clients recently requested that Softshoe come with a series of standard reports, each of which would highlight important data and information regarding a specific facet of the process. The way we handle this right now is by customizing specific CGIs to handle the reporting needs of each client. This is a very inefficient way to design - try doing this when we have 200 clients, each requesting 10 specific reports! So we are looking into using third-party software to take care of the reporting issues for us.

        An obvious choice could be Seagate Crystal Reports. Nice interface, can interact with Oracle (our back-end) through ODBC, and is web-enabled. The problem is that the Report Server component MUST run on win95/NT. For us, this would mean setting aside another seperate machine PC in addition to the Softshoe server (which runs on Solaris). This would work for now, but later on when we package Softshoe, it won't go over to well with clients that they need two machines to run the thing. The same is true for Crystal Info, although in their next release, the InfoServer component (only) will have unix support. Other possibilities could be Oracle Discoverer, and Oracle Developer 2000, but i haven't been able to look into these much yet.

        SO (finally) MY QUESTION IS THIS: does anyone know of some good, relatively inexpensive, web-enabled reporting tool which will run on Solaris, and conform to at least a subset of the following items:

• allows a report writer to custom build a report using GUI tools.
• he will be able to publish the report on the web.
• the report will be on up-to-the minute data, performing queries on the database in real-time, without placing *too* much of a burden on the CPU.
• if not EXACTLY real-time, how about automatically refreshing it's data at a specified interval?
• the system will integrate easily with oracle 8.

Other important questions: how does it access information? how does it publish reports to the web? what format does it publish reports (HTML generation on the fly could be nice)? how easy is it to perform complex queries against the db?

        Has anyone used or heard about any such reporting software? Does anyone know if oracle discoverer and/or developer 2000 could be exactly what I am looking for? Thanks for any help/suggestions.

                                Frank

--
Frank Di Maria, Jr.
Software Developer
Hot Jobs, Inc.
frank_at_hotjobs.com
212.302.0060 x353 Received on Fri Aug 28 1998 - 11:10:34 CDT