Reporting: 13 questions to answer before getting started

I get the following questions quite often and thought I gather my thoughts together in this blog post

• “Which reporting components should we use in WPF?
  Is it Infragistics, Telerik, syncfusion”
   
• “Is DevExpress XtraReports Suite still state of the art for reporting?”
   
• “Do you prefer SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) over Crystal Reports?”

Figure: Not sure if I should respond or remain silent

Before you can answer those question you need to step back and ask a couple of questions from a business point of view:

• What question is the report(s) going to answer?
   
• What decision does the report help to take?
   
• What actions do we take after seeing the report?
   

 

Then we might get a bit more technical:

• How up-to-date do the reports need to be?
   
• Do you need to see a trend over these reports over time?

 

And then you should dig deeper

• When and how should the reports be displayed?
  Windows App, Web, In Application, Excel?  (BA’s love Excel)
   
• Who is the target group of the report?
  Internal (authenticated) people only/extern?
   
• What is the report data source?
  SQL Server, Oracle, alle OleDB DB, data warehouses?
   
• Who is creating the reports?
  Developers? BAs? CXO? Technical User?
   
• Who is going to maintain the reports?
  Developers? BAs? CXO?
   
• How often should we deliver the reports? 
  On demand, Scheduled, Trigger?
   
• Are the reports fairly static of parameterized? Sub-reports?
  Reports embedded in other applications. Parameters could be Dates, Departments, People, …
   
• Is there already infrastructure of know how available?
  Crystal oder MS Report server?
   

 

Depending from these answers I would suggest:

• Infrastructure like SQL Server Reporting Services
• SQL Reporting Services reports generated on the client side
• Report Builder as a tool to develop and maintain reports
• Sharepoint Server 2010 (was Microsoft PerformancePoint Server)
• Excel Services deployed in Sharepoint
• Control suite like: devExpress, telerik, syncFusion, Infragistics
• Excel with a SQL or OLE DB datasource
• Custom pages in ASP.NET

 

If some of these terms are new to you check out my slides on Reports with SQL Server Reporting Services on SlideShare
http://www.slideshare.net/PeterGfader/reports-with-sql-server-reporting-services

And SQL Server Analysis Services and Cube browser overview
http://www.slideshare.net/PeterGfader/ssas-other-cube-browsers

 

BTW: Adam has a great collection of Reporting Tips and Tricks

How do you approach such the questions at the top??