Users Create Their Own Reports Without Programmer's Help
Milford, OH – After spending tens of thousands of dollars on a college education, students want to find a job to start them up the ladder of success – hopefully with enough income to repay that student loan as soon as possible. For almost ten years, RoboTechnologies of Milford, OH has specialized in developing software for the academic community. Their flagship product, PlacePro, helps students, faculty and potential employers connect, to ensure students find a successful placement with an employer.
PlacePro is a Microsoft .NET application that consists of a Student Module, an Employer Module and a Coordination Module, giving complete control over the entire placement process to the participants. Written in C#, PlacePro contains standard reports that give students, staff, faculty and employers the information they need to evaluate and act upon potential hiring and employment opportunities.
According to RoboTechnologies CEO, Chris Coursey, “PlacePro has over 150 built-in reports. We tried to anticipate everything a user would ever want. But as our account base grew to a certain point, we were inundated on a daily basis by requests for special reports from numerous schools. Often they were calls like ‘I need a custom report by 11 o’clock when I meet with the Dean.’ And it’s 10:30 now. We started to feel like ‘report boys’ instead of developers. Even with 150 built-in reports to choose from, there’s no way to anticipate exactly what a given user will need or want. We work with colleges and universities all across the United States and Canada from large to small, and that complicated the issue even more.”
RoboTechnologies needed a way to give its clients better access to information in the PlacePro Microsoft SQL database. After an Internet search, the company found Izenda Reports. Izenda Reports is a reporting tool for the .NET environment that can be integrated into any .NET application. It lets users self-serve, creating and modifying their own reports, as needed, without support from programmers or database experts.
“It’s the best reporting tool in the market hands down for ad hoc, self-serve reporting. It’s not a replacement for Crystal Reports, Active Reports, or SQL Reporting Services where you need precise placement to the pixel. But there is nothing that can do what Izenda Reports does for ad hoc reports. It gives users what they want, in the format they want, when they want it,” according to Coursey.
RoboTechnologies needed only about two hours to integrate Izenda Reports into their PlacePro application, and one additional week to develop and test a custom report manager which overrides and integrates seamlessly with PlacePro’s existing Report Manager.
RoboTechnologies academic clientele are satisfied as well. Gladys T. Johnson, Director of Cooperative Education at Eastern Kentucky University explains. "Because of our small staff and large Co-op Program, we needed a database that would save us time and also designed for the specific needs of a Co-op Program. PlacePro has been a tremendous help to our Co-op operation. The system has actually saved us a great amount of time, especially the Reports function. It is fantastic to be able to run a report in less than 2 minutes. The ability to create job detail reports and email them to faculty for their approval is an additional benefit. Also, the technical support we receive is another important element that I really appreciate.”
RoboTechnologies is now in the final development stages of a major release to the PlacePro suite. This new version will not only incorporate numerous features requested by their client base, but will also utilize AJAX to the fullest extent to increase performance and enhance the user experience.
Izenda, based in Atlanta, currently has thousands of deployments of its Reports tool. Many of these are integrated into branded products, like PlacePro. Others customers are at corporate IT departments, while yet others are custom development shops. They are all enjoying faster development cycles, competitive sales advantages and robust reporting capability that empower end users in this increasingly web-based software environment.
Sanjay Bhatia, CEO at Izenda, has seen similar outcomes many times. “RoboTechnologies’ experience is something we’ve seen from development companies all across North America. Putting a ‘Web 2.0 experience’ in the hands of end users, letting them self-serve, take charge and own the information in the database allows dev[elopment] teams to focus on their core initiatives, rather than the interruption of generating yet another custom report. At the same time, it gives users ownership of their data in a way that’s just not possible when traditional, programmer-intensive reporting tools are used. Izenda Reports is all about empowering users and giving time back to talented developers.
“We’ve seen market research studies that show companies install over one million databases each year, at the cost of $16 billion. Then they spend another $8 billion to get data back out for corporate users. We think empowering users with Izenda Reports will have a real impact on that latter figure.”
