Just looking for thoughts and/or experiences on using other reporting tools such as BRIO compared to WebFocus. Thnx!
-c

This message has been edited. Last edited by: FP Mod Chuck,

Well, I won't express my own opinion since it will be biased, but I can direct you to a round-up of BI Tools done by Network Computing Magazine:

http://www.nwc.com/shared/printArticle.jhtml?article=/1...0f2full.html&pub=nwc

Brio, Cognos, Microstrategy, Microsoft and Information Builders WebFOCUS are all reviewed in the round-up. Business Objects and SAS were invited but chose not to participate.

PC Magazine also just published a review of WebFOCUS here:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1047752,00.asp

You might not get too many other responses here because we're really just getting this forum up and running (it's less than a month old) and I'm not sure we have too many WebFOCUS developers on the forum yet who have experience with other BI tools.

Hope this helps!

-Chris

Thanks, Chris! Your suggestions will be useful. I appreciate them.

with some experience touching alot of bi tools, you might want to first separate them by thin-client delivery vs. thick-client delivery(or what microsoft is calling "smart client".) eg cognos is thick client.
Then you might want to look at the extent of the underlying language. All these tools sell well and present well to people who don't write code, but to people who DO write code, the flash of the gui tool just isn't even interesting...it misses the point we're looking for. So, if you're a code writer, concentrate on the math you can do in the underlying language, because as developer you need cool math to be able to create your underlying databases...then the flashy gui stuff just allows non-tech users to have fun interfacing and createing their own reports from the awesome data structures you've created for them. Ask all your vendors, for example, to create a cartesion product on the fly...and see who chokes.

I evaluated COGNOS for our area. COGNOS is an easy to use tool and does fine if you have all your data in the database. The biggest drawback was joining to outside files. We ended doing the join in Access with a UNION and resulted in long response time.

We scrapped COGNOS and moved to WebFOCUS!

Thanks for the aged flashbacks...

Carol (Hello again) ... I'm seeing some of those 'drawbacks' which converting reports from Cognos to WebFOCUS, especially with their 'ROUNDING' of deciaml numbers, not to mention converting their JOINs.