For those who know about Report Manager, it’s the PeopleSoft-delivered means of finding and accessing reports. For those who support people who use Report Manager, there are quite a few significant usability issues with it. Issues? What issues? The main issue with Report Manager is that it doesn’t know very much about the reports that it manages, which means that it’s limited from the start. It also has limited features to allow configuration of the behavior of this product. Because it’s the primary means by which users access reports, these limitations have significant ramifications with the user satisfaction, adoption and productivity in reporting. Unfortunately, most BI tools aren’t a whole lot better in terms of managing and accessing reports. So, how do you fix it? Grey Sparling fixed it by doing three main things:

1. We capture the information that describes the content of a report.
2. We allow you to use that information in combination with information in your PeopleSoft application to provide a rich user interface for organizing, finding, and describing the reports.
3. We allow you to configure the behavior of organizing, accessing, and using reports.

The end-result is a product named Report Explorer, which is revolutionary in how it solves these problems. What do you mean, revolutionary??? The reason its revolutionary is that it is the only product that uses artifacts in your business application to help describe and organize reports in business terms. It’s also revolutionary in the amount of control you have over the behavior of the user interface. So, how do I learn more? I’m glad you asked. We’ve recorded a demo that shows the product in action here. We’ve also put out a marketing brief that describes it here. Finally, if you want to talk with us about it in person, our contact information can be found here.

Labels: Products, Report_Manager