Actuate BIRT iServer Express Review

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Author: Paul Bappoo

Continuing my journey into BIRT Reporting I install the iServer Express, find an excellent online guide and follow it to view reports, modify reports and save the modified versions in my own user area on the iServer.

Article:

It's only been a few weeks since I first saw BIRT in action and in only a limited amount of time I have found that I was able to easily get started with the Open Source (free of charge) version and then moved on to compare some of the differences with the Actuate commercial version.

During this time I noticed that Actuate had BIRT extension products which allow the user to design their own reports over the web, manage their reports, view reports created by others and make modifications to those reports at runtime.

In this short report I take a look at two of those components, the iServerExpress and the BIRT Interactive viewer.

Having been able to easily create and run reports using the open source products I was a little confused as to what else the additional product offerings could do for me and in this report I set aside 2 hours on a Saturday to find out.

One point I would like to mention at this stage, is that many people I have been speaking to recently about BIRT tell me that that are too short of time to spend enough time learning and getting to know BIRT. I understand the time pressures people are under and one of the things that has impressed me the most about BIRT is how quickly I have been able to learn a surprising amount about it. All you need to do it give yourself a few hours a week and follow these guides available from

http://www.BIRTReporting.com

and the other excellent material which can be found at

http://www.Birt-Exchange.com

and you will be up and running in no time.

Often the hardest step on any journey is the first, so put a note in your diary, block out an hour of time this week to spend in the company of this wonderful report writer and see where your journey takes you!

Staying with the subject of time shortages for a moment, one of the great things about iServerExpress is the fact that it is a tool that is designed to save you time. Having been involved with many organizations with fairly large user communities I cant help but notice that users' demands for reports can eat time away from the IT department like it is going out of fashion. Also, with so many reports and variations of reports floating around an organization in different formats and created using different tools this is an area that is quite difficult to keep track of easily.

iServerExpress solves both of these problems by allowing you to publish your reports to a central location that is available to the whole organization or selected users depending on their security permissions. This keeps all the reports in one place and means that you can easily direct a user to the correct location when they need that urgent report.

Also, after a while you will have built up quite an impressive report repository on the iServer so the majority of users last minute urgent request should be able to be met by a report from your library. Sometimes of course you might have to make small amendments to one of your standard library reports in order to meet a specific request. This is where iServerExpress lends you another helping hand as the user can select a report which is similar to what they need and then make their own minor modifications to it using the interactive viewer, then save the modified version into their own personal report library.

Great for the end user because they don't have to depend (and wait) on someone from IT to create their report for them and great for IT because the number of end user report modification requests drops significantly.

Once again, Actuate have clearly put some thought into this product and are solving actual users real world problems in an easy to learn and quick to implement technology solution.

To download the complete version of this report in PDF format, with screenshots and some exercises to try out, to get you going with iServer Express please visit:

http://www.BirtReporting.com

and get your free membership. You will then have full access to all my reports and guides to Birt Reporting.