This post is more than 5 years old
1 Message
0
762
January 29th, 2014 00:00
SRM 3.0 Report Wizard
Loving the new version of SRM (had to be said). However one issue still nags at my soul, in my line of work we have to create a lot of custom reports and the way we do this is from the ground up or by directly creating XML templates. Now this is all fine and dandy although one cannot but think how much easier it may be to have a more advanced and easier to use Report Wizard, one that easily allows you to customize a view for a client without having to put in all the hours... Now I'm not saying I have a problem with the current version of the wizard, although the interface is rather old-school, there should simply be an easier way to go about it.
Imagine for a second deploying SRM at a client, they see all the wonderful things the product can do and decide they would like some custom reports created to meet their own specific needs. We now have to pull the metrics from the bottom up and mess around with filters and so on from the Edit View. There simply must be an easier way to go about this, clients want what they want when we want it and whatever we can do to reduce the amount of time it takes to meet their needs will only be beneficial to everyone involved.
macgaver1
9 Posts
0
January 29th, 2014 09:00
Hi,
Thank you for the feedback, we will improve this in a near future, but the objective of the report wizard is not to be able to create any kind of report.
Just to put you in context, some years ago (version 5.X of Watch4net), we were quickly improving the report-wizard to become the “New Way” to build all type of report, and at some point, replace the “edit-mode way” to create advanced reports. We were following customers and we had at that time positive and negative feedbacks about this. After analysis, we figured that we have two different types of users. Some are non-admin, consuming reports (browse-mode access only) and they are looking for a simple web interface without the need for any training or knowledge of the infrastructure. For this group of user, the custom report means visualize in a table or a graph a specific set of metrics. The other type of user is more expert of the product, they want any kind of report on any kind of data known by Watch4net (data many SolutionPacks coming from SRM suite or SA suite).
So at that time, after customer discussions, we decided to limit the report-wizard to keep it simple, and to keep the edit-mode for the product admins and the experts. We added more simplicity in the edit-mode (cut-paste of columns, formula, …) and possibility to read and see how we did all available reports available out of the box to learn and understand. We now also provide training dedicated to report customization.
The first improvement coming on the Report Wizard will be on the very first step (the one asking for the View Type). This first question can be simplified. We also have some nice improvements coming to help report customization … Stay tuned!
Have a nice day