Getting Best Reporting Software

Have you ever heard of reporting software? Believe me; this software will help you a lot!

I really crave – of all things – reporting software. (And yeah, friends say I require escaping from the basement more.) Because at my last company, we applied the "market leader" in reporting and business intelligence. It sucked. It was dreary (individually formatted fields?! c'mon) and I kept getting annoyed by colleagues with question after question after question.

Big appreciation to Santosh, my new superior who gave me the authority to test and eventually select reporting and document generation software for our company. There are a few items I'm seeking for. It must be able to work with XML reports AND SQL reports. Our data is all over the place, but mostly SQL databases and XML files. We're not about to misuse time transferring everything into one data storage space format although we try to avoid Excel data and reports.

Our company has lots of diverse programmers, so it also has to handle Java reports, .net reports, C# reports, visual basic reports, and C++ reports. And it would be great if it could generate Python reports, PHP reports and Ruby reports. (Not to sound too greedy, but that's my desire list. We have a cool new programmer who keeps bugging me about ruby on rails reports. Let me discover something so I can leave a bunch of this work on someone else.)

I'm in the process of demoing Windward Reports and so far it's WAY enhanced than what I was used to. They have a discussion about their reporting software and business intelligence and say they can be used for java reports, dotnet reports and csharp reports. In our primary test it has held everything we've thrown at it.

It's quick and tough. It didn't take long to propose my first report. (in fact, I asked one of the HR people to design a template – she designed it in about 20 minutes. I just had to tweak the data tags.) And it looks like they're about to begin software that is programming language agnostic. But we haven't searched everything Windward is supposed to be able to do. And don't get me started on Excel reports...

Do you have experience with Windward's reporting software or business intelligence stuff? Let me know – particularly if you believe it sucks as much as the "rhymes with pistol" software. I don't wish for the headaches for a second time.