"Informer was one of our best purchases. It not only made our end users happy but made things easier for the end users and IT. IT is able to spend more time in other areas because reporting has gotten easier."
Challenge
Kyle Rima, Database Administrator at Westminster College researched reporting options for about a year and had finally given up, deciding to stay with colon prompt reporting. However, users still suffered as these reports lacked interactivity, were in a static format, and requests had to be made to IT each time a new report was needed. As a result, creating reports took up a lot of IT’s time.
Alternate reporting solutions they tested were very expensive, extremely time consuming to setup, and not user friendly.
In addition, like many schools, Westminster has a SQL database for the admissions office and a MultiValue database for the rest of campus and struggle with data integrity and integration issues between the two systems.
Solution
When Westminster discovered Informer in 2006, they were immediately impressed by the simplicity, ease of setup, and flexibility. Users have created reports in Informer that look at the data between the two systems to uncover discrepancies. They use Informer’s calculated columns feature to compare data coming from both systems, and then sort and group report data on select fields to easily see errors. They are also using Informer to pull status reports for both systems. “Possibly the nicest thing is having all reports accessible from one consolidated place”, says Rima.
Informer enabled Westminster to push report creation out to more users, and empower users to modify and customize reports based on their individual needs. “The ability to export data easily has been great and the ability to schedule reports is awesome”, says Rima.
Results
We have many users that are able to create 90% of their reports on their own and only need IT when they get stuck,” says Rima. “It is saving them time and it is saving IT time.” Everyone they show Informer to wants it and uses it, he says. In the month of September they ran 5,761 reports and have 90 scheduled reports just from their main database with many more from their alumni database.
“I can’t imagine now what we would do without Informer”, says Rima. “It is so easy to setup, build reports, run reports, and schedule reports. The people who use Informer on campus love it”. Rima says he would recommend Informer to anyone who would listen. “So often we get products that don’t live up to what the salesman said it would be. We have yet to be disappointed by Informer and are usually surprised by the great features that keep getting added.”
