The new business reporting tool in town - NextReports

Reporting tools play a very important role in the development of a company. This is because all the important information that arrives from the lower branches and departments has to be synthesized in order to be passed along to the management team.Transforming raw data in easy to read and take-in information has never been an easy task: until now.

With the business intelligence software market growing day by day, managers have hundreds of reporting tools to choose from. Today I want to write about one of the products that caught my eye the other month. It’s called NextReports and I think it’s one of the most well thought reporting tools on the market.

It actually offers two separate tools for free and one at a small price.They can be combined or used separately, depending on the size of the pool of data that your company has. One is specifically tailored to fit your every report designing needs, another one is the engine, the part that helps you create, manage and schedule your reports and the last one is a special server.

Now let’s analyse them piece by piece.

First is NextReports designer. You can use the provided templates, you can customize them and even create reports templates from scratch. You can use it in connection with other platforms such as Oracle, MySql or Derby and get excellent results. And being free of charge, you can download it, test it and see if it works for your company. If not, you can always change your mind.

The NextReports engine is a bit hard to explain to the non java speaking users, but I will try. The main purpose for this software is to display reports inside websites or internal business apps. It uses a Java based library to push the reports you’ve created earlier wherever you like. It’s also free of charge - so you are one click away from having the reports your customers need on your website.

Last but not least, the NextReports server. This is the only product from NextReports that has a price tag, but no worries, it’s not as expensive as most reporting software out there are. This software will help you schedule periodical reports, send them via FTP or mail and by using the Dashboard (a very smart looking user interface) you will be able to get alerts, set alarms and even set and cancel scheduled reports.

I think it’s a great tool to use for any company, big or small. I have yet to find another tool as promising as this one and I promise you it will not let you down.