Reporting Services

The mission of the iSolutions Reporting team is to enable colleagues to extract the information they require from our corporate IT systems. We do this in two ways:
1. Write reporting programmes that users may run to generate reports.
2. Build ‘metalayers’ that allow users who wish to write their own reports to see a simplified and meaningful view of the data in the corporate databases.


We use different reporting tools:
For reporting from the Student Administration system (aka ‘Banner’) we use Oracle Discoverer and Oracle Reports. While Oracle Discoverer is suitable as an end-user reporting tool Oracle Reports is a much more powerful tool geared towards IT staff. Oracle Discoverer can produce tabular data but with Oracle Reports any report layout can be produced.
For reporting from our HR system, Resourcelink, we use Cognos BI version 8. This is a more modern reporting tool. We’re also using Cognos to develop reports from the ESS system.

A SUSSED group "iSolutions Reporting" has been set up to keep users with an interest in reports aware of new developments by the iSolutions Reporting team.

 

A note about Metalayers:
• Instead of reporting on tables and columns with cryptic names, the report writer see meaningful terms
• Oracle Discoverer and Cognos BI both have the concept of a ‘Metalayer’. This is a ‘view’ of the underlying database in business terms that can be used by the report writer.
• In Discoverer this is called the ‘End User Layer’, in Cognos it’s called the ‘Framework’