With the introduction of SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio .Net 2005, a powerful solution emerged from Microsoft to meet the requirements of business users for report design, implementation and deployment.  Most importantly the integration with popular Microsoft Office productivity desktop tools such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel is completely seamless. Since its initial release and the imminent integration of Microsoft .NET Framework in Windows and MS Office products plus the release of SharePoint, the SSRS offering has become more popular and widely accepted and adopted by many organizations.

To make effective utilization of existing infrastructure, reporting solutions should leverage existing data structures with minimum modifications to their core functions. In other words, the existing functions should work uninterrupted and the new reporting solution should become a “snap-on” module to the current application.

Today, the market offers a myriad of alternatives for Business Intelligence and Reporting products ranging from ad-hoc reporting and query tools to full data warehousing solutions. From the MultiValue perspective any reporting solution to be considered should take into account a short, medium and long term approach as building blocks that can be added as these become available.

A complete reporting solution that will effectively complement existing MultiValue applications should address the following:

. User Friendly interface for the design, creation and maintainability of rich graphical reports
. Ad hoc rendering of reports with full drill down and drill through capabilities
. Ability to render graphic output including pie, line or bar charts as standalone reports or combined with supporting data elements
.  Ability to render reports in multiple formats such as matrix, tabular, lists or columnar with sub totals and data sensitive link options
. Ability to combine or merge multiple report output into a single document (sub reports)
. Ability to leverage existing multivalue dictionary data definitions and normalize on the fly if required 
. Provide output options such as Word, Excel, PDFs and XML
. Extend delivery options of generated reports to users and/or distribution lists via email with attachments, or links to a secure reporting portal
. Ability to post generated reports to a secure Reporting Portal for viewing or archival
. Ability to take snapshots of existing reports and archive for later view
. Ability to render reports using a web browser interface
. Ability to integrate report rendering to the most popular desktop products (MS Office)
. Ability to automate the creation of the reports without operation intervention
. Ability to subscribe to a specific report
. Provide a secure environment by roles and user groups to prevent unauthorized viewing of reports
. Ad-hoc reporting option
. Ease of design and customization to extend reporting presentation or addition of new reports.

With the above mentioned features, authorized users will have the ability to extract data in a multitude of formats and update their own spreadsheets and/or relational database systems for further data analysis.

With the above mentioned features, authorized users will have the ability to extract data in a multitude of formats and update their own spreadsheets and/or relational database systems for further data analysis.
To fully leverage the capabilities of this powerful BI reporting solution you need the following:

. An existing MultiValue environment such as D3, UniVerse or UniData
. OASYS SSR
. Identification and creation of additional supporting file structures and/or indexes required to streamline the operation and functionality of existing reporting definitions
. A bridge account containing local dictionary definitions to be used in reports
. Windows 2003 or 2008 Server with IIS and SMTP services (optional for email delivery) enabled
.  SQL Server 2005 or 2008 RDBMS with Reporting Services enabled
. SQL Server agent for subscriptions and unattended operations 
.  Browser Interface, preferable Internet Explorer.

To realize the real potential of any reporting solution, it is important to consider a modular approach which takes into account ease of installation and upgradeability to existing applications. For resellers a reasonable price point of the final product offering is also advisable.

Reporting and Business Intelligence solutions provide the means to closely interact with multiple levels of the organization. Onsystex can assist in design, development and implementation of reporting solutions based on SQL Server Reporting Services.