iPad + You = Enterprise Reporting

Which of these statements resonates most with you?

"Management wants a reporting dashboard."

"The client needs a reporting solution with the app we just delivered."

"You can’t manage what you don’t measure."

Reporting against data is a natural extension of just about any application. Beyond that, typical business environments are replete with data warehouses, SharePoint installs, web services and other data structures with data eagerly awaiting analysis.

Usually reports are coded from the ground up because stock reporting solutions just don’t suffice. The needs of each organization are unique to the business and often require some finesse. Unfortunately this “finesse” comes at the cost of more code to write and maintain, more licenses for reporting development and server environments, more work for IT support staff - and the list goes on.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just connect to these data services and build reports that make sense on something as easy-to-use as your iPad?

Yes, indeed - meet ReportPlus!

ReportPlus is a self-service business intelligence tool which makes it easy for you to connect to enterprise data sources and quickly get started. Using nothing but standard gestures and interactions you can build reports all on the iPad. Now when I say enterprise data sources that means data as formally structured as SQL Server Reporting Services to data thrown together in an Excel sheet – it’s just that flexible.

Building Reports

Once you’ve chosen a data source then you can easily build pivot tables, sort and filter your data and select a visualization style.

You have complete control over the fields that show up in your report. You can even drag and drop items in the Fields list to reorder the fields in the report.

The pivot editor gives you the ability to slice-and-dice data in ways that make the most sense to you. You can even add ad-hoc filtering by dragging fields into the Filters placeholder.

Once the data is shaped the way you want it then you select a visualization type. There are a host of visualization options that range from single and multi-series charts, maps and text.

Then you can fine-tune the final result by adding conditional filters, configuring the data fields or decide on the final look of the visualization.

Once the dashboard is complete you can choose to share either with other ReportPlus users or anyone with an email address. Existing ReportPlus users can have access to the source dashboard file and those without an iPad or ReportPlus can access either screenshots or PowerPoint presentations sent directly to their inbox.

For more details and quick overview, check out the ReportPlus introduction video.

So, for me, ReportPlus is really exciting because now the tedious task of building reports is just as simple as tapping away at your iPad. ReportPlus is available in the App Store here.

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Full Disclosure: Yes, I am the voice of the ReportPlus videos, but I am also a developer and I truly would rather do reporting the ReportPlus way rather than build them from scratch ;)