Feedback on Report Customization requirements

Hello,
I would like to get some feedback from the users/customers of SQL Server
Reporting Services and other reporting technologies on common customization
requirements for reports.
Let's assume that you have purchased a customizable business/ERP application
from an Independent Solution Vendor and that the application contains a
number of built in reports. Alternatively you could be a consultant/vendor
who customizes applications to suit specific customer requirements.
What are the common types of customizations that you are likely to implement
(or have implemented in such scenarios) on the base set of reports to tailor
them to suit your/your customer requirements prior to deploying the app in
your environment?
Some examples of customizations are:
a) Adding additional fields to a report
b) Adding additional data regions to a report (Example: Adding an Employee
Sales summary chart to an Employee details report)
c) Replacing a data region with an alternate data region (Example: Replacing
a matrix report that displays product category sales by Year with a chart
that plots Sales figures using Product Category as the Category group and
Year as the Series group)
d) Enhancing a data region (Example: Adding addition row/column groupings to
a matrix report and enabling drill down functionality)
etc...
Looking forward to hearing some feedback on this topic.
Thanks
KarthikI think the top three reasons our users want to customize the standard
reports they receive as part of the software are:
1) They want to add additional fields. Sometimes these fields are returned
by the stored procedure the report's using to gather its data, sometimes
they're not. In the case that they're not, our users are often unsuccessful
at finding where the data they need is in the database and how to do the
proper joins to get it. If the data they need repeats it's even more complex
for them to implement.
2) They want to modify the sorting, grouping, or filtering of the report.
Right now we're using Crystal Reports for our reporting product, though
we're strongly considering moving to SQL Reporting Services due to the many
problems we've had with Crystal. If users have had Crystal Reports training
they can usually modify the sort and filter criteria (though the filtering
would likely be a less efficient client-side filter rather than changing the
stored procedure), but changing the grouping is a more advanced topic that's
a little trickier to understand.
My feeling is that finding the commands for changing the sorting and
filtering in SQL Reporting Services is currently not as straightforward as
an in Crystal, mostly due to the free-form layout vs. banded report writer
paradigm shift. Grouping seems about the same in both environments. More
wizards or putting some of these tasks in a VS .Net 2005-style common tasks
menu on the right of controls might be ways to simplify things for end
users.
3) They want to change the appearance of the report (i.e. they want all
their print outs to be Times New Roman instead of Arial, add their logo,
etc.). This isn't done very commonly these days because of the effort
involved with changing close to 100 reports, and the customer would have to
repeat this effort in order to stay current when we release an update to the
standard reports. Our thought is that were we to support either of these
things going forward, it would be best to build our standard reports with
places for a logo or formulas for the text fonts that would be based on some
DB system-wide option in our software.
Jeff Davis
"Karthik Ravindran [MSFT]" <Karthik Ravindran
[MSFT]@.discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:99C32B25-9979-4120-B04E-6CDBB7B03AD3@.microsoft.com...
> Hello,
> I would like to get some feedback from the users/customers of SQL Server
> Reporting Services and other reporting technologies on common
customization
> requirements for reports.
> Let's assume that you have purchased a customizable business/ERP
application
> from an Independent Solution Vendor and that the application contains a
> number of built in reports. Alternatively you could be a consultant/vendor
> who customizes applications to suit specific customer requirements.
> What are the common types of customizations that you are likely to
implement
> (or have implemented in such scenarios) on the base set of reports to
tailor
> them to suit your/your customer requirements prior to deploying the app in
> your environment?
> Some examples of customizations are:
> a) Adding additional fields to a report
> b) Adding additional data regions to a report (Example: Adding an Employee
> Sales summary chart to an Employee details report)
> c) Replacing a data region with an alternate data region (Example:
Replacing
> a matrix report that displays product category sales by Year with a chart
> that plots Sales figures using Product Category as the Category group and
> Year as the Series group)
> d) Enhancing a data region (Example: Adding addition row/column groupings
to
> a matrix report and enabling drill down functionality)
> etc...
> Looking forward to hearing some feedback on this topic.
> Thanks
> Karthik