Moving to new reporting tool

Kevin McKenna — Fri, 05 Apr 2019 13:55:17 +0000

Hi all,

I work as part of the IT team for a number of research studies. My main study right now runs on Microsoft SQL Server 2017 and .NET web applications.

The reporting tool put in place forever ago was SQL Server 2008 SSRS - which unfortunately is rapidly approaching end of life.

I've spent a bit of time putting new reports directly into the web application and bypassing SSRS as much as possible, but the more requests that are coming in, the less workable that solution is.

What I'd like to do is move to some new reporting tool (basic grids of data with some light formatting [back color, text color etc.]). All the table joins etc. are handled in the stored procedures in the database, so the reporting tool only needs to take the input and display it.

Must haves:

Free (it is a non-big-pharma research study and the budget just isn't there)
Can be embedded into another web-app (security not required)
Can handle basic formatting of cells
Can export to Excel (with formatting in place)
Simple to use

Nice to haves [but not necessary]:

A report designer would be helpful, but not a show-stopper so long as report definitions can be hand coded with relative ease
Chart functions
Open Source

Can anyone recommend anything, or am I asking a stretch too far considering my budget of.. well.. zero.

Thanks!

Getting organized

Kevin McKenna — Wed, 03 Apr 2019 02:14:53 +0000

So I have gone back and forth on what my first post should be.. should I try and show off some knowledge, should I write a tutorial, should I tackle a new project and write about that?

Then I decided that maybe what I should really post is to find out how other people manage with probably my biggest weakness.. staying organized.

I head up a small team that works on a few projects at a time. Most of the key end users are the same, but the projects differ, though are often similar-ish. I get a ton of emails from people talking about different projects without any kind of subject line cue, and sometimes even emails covering multiple projects in a single email.. and if I'm being honest, my inbox is a MESS.

I've tried moving the emails based on project, but have a hard time where it covers multiple projects, and even then it's just breaking the mess up.
I've tried subfolders under each project but often can't classify them to a single issue etc. I tried splitting them by person, but that doesn't really help keep my focus to a single project (and one person in particular has about 30000 emails stretching back several years)

So I end up doing a big cleanup about once every few months and say to myself.. this time I'm keeping my inbox at 0 emails from now on.. but we all know I'm lying to myself.

How do you all keep your email organized, easy to search and without burying emails in a million subfolders never to be seen again?

DEV Community: Kevin McKenna

Moving to new reporting tool

Getting organized