Introducing ReportPlus: Building Enterprise Dashboards on the iPad

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away we set out to build a solution that would challenge in some way the current status quo in the mobile business intelligence segment that treats the iPad pretty much as a one-way, consuming only experience, as a second class citizen.

In a time where mobile devices are becoming more and more capable we tried to envision how any power user could generate business intelligence insights based only on his iPad, assuming availability of any of an array of popular enterprise technologies, and relying as little as possible on any IT intervention for his self service BI journey to be a success.

Such a solution would enable anyone in the organization with an iPad, to be able to access LOB data, stored for instance in a SharePoint library, or a SQL Server database, or a Reporting Services report, even an Analysis Services cube, without the hassle of going through any additional server side setup or configuration. The premise is simple, if the user has clearance, then he should be able to access enterprise data from the iPad, no excuses.

Additionally, this solution would allow him to filter & pivot that information, customizing the way it’s presented, allowing charting options, and composing all views in meaningful dashboards, that he could share. Since that authoring experience would be completely based on the iPad, all the interactions of the process would have to accommodate to a gesture based experience, so it should be a tap and drag driven interaction. The goal would be to provide the most simple, and easy to use user experience possible.

So we’ve been working hard to make that vision a reality, and we are very pleased to announce that the result of that effort is already available for download. We call it ReportPlus, you can check it out in the iTunes app store.

For more information, check this ReportPlus Introductory video, and Craig's post on the subject.