Re: Business Objects with DB2 data

On 8/2/2013 9:28 AM, Hoteltravelfundotcom wrote:

The decision to go to business objects is based on having a front end
portal for the end users to create reports.

It's my personal experience that if end users are not currently creating
their own reports [1] they will not be able to do so with Crystal, BO,
SEQUEL or any other reporting tool. Among the reasons: Database
relations not easily understood. Database field names short and not
understood. Business rules are... fluid (for sales region 3 fiscal year
is Apr-Mar, for region 1 it's Jan-Dec; all sales regions data in the
same database tables and the programs are hard coded to deal with this).
End users not technical enough. Data access security is hard coded in
the programs (users X, Y and Z can access region 3 but not region 1; all
data in the same tables. OS security doesn't help here. Worse, some
terminals can access some records, but not all.) Corporate rules forbid
downloading the product catalogue, customer list or sales history;
reporting tools are designed to do exactly this.

I have never seen a reporting tool deployed to end users without
significant IT staff support. Never. 30+ years.
--buck

[1] Today, anyone can install an ODBC driver and use Open Office to run
queries, create reports and downloads and even update the database on
IBM i. It requires a certain amount of technical expertise to install,
but Google has explained ODBC installation to thousands of people. If
the IBM i database were easy enough to query, your users would already
be doing it.