Effective reporting is an essential ingredient of the decision making process in any business, regardless of its size.

Tagra specialises in high-powered reporting using the following, best-of-breed tools:

COGNOS 8 AND IMPROMPTU

Cognos is one of the leading BI vendors in the market. Impromptu, one of its most established products, is an extremely powerful reporting tool, designed to cater for the most complex requirements.

Cognos 8 allows you to create and distribute highly functional reports for your enterprise in a web browser.

Key Features:

• Easy to use, graphical interface
• Ability of users to write their own reports, in a controlled environment
• Can be used against any ODBC compliant database
• Allows exporting to alternative formats – e.g. text file, formatted excel spreadsheet

Strong security model – administrator can control exactly what information users can access

• Reports integrate into Connection the Cognos BI portal.
• Reports based on other reports – impromptu can cache reports, and dynamically use them as a data source (similar to how views are used in SQL server)
• API allowing scripts to be used to automate reports/processes.

Tagra has many years of experience in helping customers deliver powerful reports which span all aspects of an organisation’s activities.

 

MICROSOFT REPORTING SERVICES

Microsoft Reporting Services is a revolutionary reporting product from Microsoft. It is a powerful web-based reporting package, and is included as part of SQL Server 2005, with no additional investment!

Reporting services is based on .NET, and benefits from the performance, security, and scalability associated with the .NET framework When used together with SharePoint Portal, or Windows Sharepoint Services, a powerful enterprise solution can be provided.

The architecture of reporting services can be best understood by considering the three activities in the reporting lifecycle.

Authoring
Reports are authored using the "Report Designer" in Visual Studio.NET. A graphical interface is provided to facilitate all the aspects of report design, and is very similar to Microsoft Access. (Reports can in fact be imported from Access).

Management
Report management is achieved using "Report Manager", which is a web-based portal and comes packaged with Reporting services. All aspects of security and report management can be controlled from here.

Delivery
Users can access their reports through Report Manager. Reports can also be scheduled for delivery through subscriptions, and can be delivered in the form of an email, file share, or hard-copy printout.

Key features:

• High ROI:- No additional licence costs are incurred - all users licenced for SQL server will be able to use reporting services at no additional cost.
• Web Browser front-end for browsing reports, as well as administration.
• "Push" and "Pull" of information - users can browse reports, or subscribe to reports.
• Report Formats - in addition to HTML, reports can be rendered in numerous other formats e.g. pdf, excel, email, CSV , XML.
• Strong charting functionality.
• Linked reports - hyperlinks can be used on all fields to allow users to "drill through" to related information in different reports.
• Drill Reports - users can drill from summary figures to underlying detail.
• Document map reports - long reports can be easily be navigated with the help of a document map.
• OLAP queries supported through MDX.
• Although reporting services itself utilises SQL Server 2000, it can attach to, and report against any ODBC compliant database.
• The ability to use multiple data-sources for a single report.
• Strong windows-integrated security model.

Tagra has specialist skills in deploying Reporting Services to cover all aspects of enterprise reporting.

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