I just had a discussion with the boss who has been holding on to the cheque to IBI for maintenance - because it pains him to death that all we (a small company) get from WF are about 20 ReportCaster jobs daily and have roughly 150 other reports.

We currently use WF 7705 and are thinking about upgrading to the latest version of WF 8.

He wants our salespeople to be able to create their own reports, although I have cautioned that if they don't understand the data (and they don't) they will get misleading results.

Our 7705 licence as I understand it, covers reporting, reportcaster and maintain (although we haven't used the latter at this point).

All of this is a long-winded explanation leading up to: Has IBI thrown in any additional features in WF 8 that come at no additional cost?

I think what we need is InfoAssist and probably Active Reports, but the cost last time I looked at Active Reports, is daunting.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: <Kathryn Henning>,

you should be able to use InfoASsist now, and build your own Reporting Objects, and turn your sales force lose.
IA works nicely on windows, (not so hot on unix)
8 is a whole n'other ball o' wax, and only sales people are going to be able to spin 'advantages'. keeping your maintenance up tho is a good idea even if you don't go 8 , b/c you'll want to stay current with 7.n.
if you don't have a license for InfoAssist, by all means get one.
you might benefit from becoming friends with Francis Mariani, he's up in Toronto, and a genius.

I would bargain the Info Assist licence for the maintain licence.

see? genius!

My experience is that people don't want to build there own reports but get the data they want, and this is usually via parameterised reports.

The difficult part is to find out what they actually want/need.

Good luck

What they really want is not to have to depend on some dusty guy in the basement (that's where we're located) to make their reports when they get around to it. After all, they need it now and how hard can it be? It's just a few numbers added up.

What they don't realize is that those same guys get them what they need (information) instead of what they think they want (data) and that they don't get around to making their own reports either.

I'm very humbly aware that all of you - Susannah, Francis and Waz and Wep - are geniuses, and your suggestions are more than helpful.

I'd already thought about bargaining away the maintain licence, 'cause I build my datamart with MODIFY anyway.

I am a "I hate everything Microsoft" kind of guy, partly out of sheer bullheadedness, so we use Linux servers only, so the "not so hot on unix" gives me pause.

And Waz's and Wep's comments are EXACTLY what I think. Parameterized reports are the only certain way to make sure they don't do dumb things like adding pounds, kilos and units, or creating an average of percentages.

So what happens now is that they ask for a report and I churn it out in a couple of hours. I don't put every report on the menu, because in my experience they never want exactly the same report again. And when I do put reports on the menu with parameters, they either never use them, or still call me up because everything is a special case.

And WF is only part of my job (meaning I never get to become truly expert), because I am the entire IT department for our 50-person company - which nonetheless spans 5 countries and 2 continents.

The maintenance is a really difficult issue, because the boss was persuaded to go from Focus for Windows to WebFocus only because he thought it would magically do everything, without actually paying for expert programmers. And I don't have time (or the inclination, on my salary) to become tuly expert.

That's my rant for today ... I'll let you know how it goes...

This message has been edited. Last edited by: George Patton,

I am curious what issues one has regarding infoassist on linux. we recently moved to linux and i need to plan accordingly as we intend tto roll out infoassit for limited usage with people who have appropriate technical ability.

I have other questions to regarding IA but ill save that for another thread.

Hi George,
Well, we just moved to 803M in a controlled release. The benefit (I was told) is the added security and HTML 5. What we have found thou is a mess. Parameters are not getting passed from launch pages, so none of our existing reports work on 8. We have an open case on it right now. So I'm still developing in 7 and not using the 8 until this is fixed. I will let you know if this ever gets resolved and if my opinion of 8 changes.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: MAdams1,

quote:

Parameters are not getting passed from launch pages, so none of our existing reports work on 8.

That's rather... essential!

That's specific to the combination of InfoAssist on a Linux server as I understand it?

No, we are not Linux and not using Info Assist. Just plain html launch pages and fex's.

george, the issue with Unix was slowness. and i don't mean just a little slow...i mean deal-breakingly slow

MAdams1

We are testing V8 and what we have found is you have to open the existing HTML in the V8 HTML tool and save it...then your HTML will work. If you are like us who have hundreds of reports this is not very practical. There should be another way.

Thank you Prarie. I will give it a try and yes I agree not practical and this should be easier.

The integration of LDAP is a huge advantage for us. We were able to allow users access to WF portals without having to add users to Webfocus itself.

It all is being managed by LDAP groups which our users already have assigned.

Thanks Michelle, Susannah, and others... As a result, we won't be moving to V8 anytime soon !

Susannah - We are looking at Personal InfoAssist, not the full version that requires MRE. Do you have any experience with that? (I spoke yesterday with our IBI regional manager, and she says that in all of her years with IBI no-one has ever asked her about Personal InfoAssist, so she would have to look it up ! )

There's a lot of infomation in the WebFOCUS 8 Migration Testing? post which explains most of the issues with WebFOCUS 8 Migration and Testing?

never heard of it

what we did about it here was go to BO

BO - What a distressing product.

Distressing - Adjective
Causing anxiety, sorrow or pain; upsetting.

BO? We're nearly rid of that and our users are super happy with the reports we created for them to replace their many versions of their former BO reports.

They get their information a LOT faster now that they no longer have to wait for BO to start up and run its slow reports - our WF reports are more informative, better structured and a LOT faster. Admittedly, that's largely due to the fact that we use more efficient SQL than what was in those BO reports.

No way we'd be able to convince them to go back there :P

of course. you're on WINDOWS!

MAdams1:

Existing HTML Composer pages are expected to run from release 8. If they are in Managed Reporting, an MR Migration of all content is required of course. If you open a page in HTML Composer, the pathing and paradigm is converted to the release 8 structure and can be tested by running from the open UI. If you then save, the new pathing and paradigm are written out to disk. If a page has custom JavaScript or manual modifications, those pages may not run.

Since you have a case open, please provide the case number so that I may take a look at it.

Thanks.

Case number: 91992526 opened by my supervisor, Gwen. Thanks David

MAdams1:

According to that case, CSS explained that it works for them in release 8003 and that "Gwen" is working on upgrading to 8002 and was going to test it there and get back to CSS. CSS reached out on August 21 and left a message since there was no answer.

David, Can this be automated for those (of us) who may have hundreds+ html pages?

quote:

If you open a page in HTML Composer, the pathing and paradigm is converted to the release 8 structure and can be tested by running from the open UI. If you then save, the new pathing and paradigm are written out to disk. If a page has custom JavaScript or manual modifications, those pages may not run.

According to David Glick,

quote:

Existing HTML Composer pages are expected to run from release 8. If they are in Managed Reporting, an MR Migration of all content is required of course.

So, in theory, all you need to do is migrate the programs. They don't need to be opened and converted. Only when they're opened, are they converted.

We didnt have any issues with any HTML that was either migrated from WF 7 in MRE or on the server itself. Initial testing was fine.

Of course we identified "code tightening" but that is expected with each release.

I did how-ever, run into issues after the migration where I wanted to modernize the folder stucture. I had copied content from one folder to the other which caused html,programs to no longer work. IBI has now documented the process on how to cleanly modernize your structure.