Power Users vs Casual Users

[maverick00]

What end user reporting tool most satifies both power users and casual end users? We currently use a SQL writing tool and are looking for new software that is friendlier to most end users. We do not want to alienate the power users.

 

[RogerCruse]

Business Objects

 

[maverick00]

RogerCruse, can you elaborate?

 

[RogerCruse]

We faced the same dilemma four years ago when we were looking for a solution for business & power users.

We now have over 400 business users and about 50 power users. All of them use BO.

 

[Guest_imported]

I would look at Microstrategy. Of course it depends on the size of your warehouse and your need for flexibility. The MSI product has served our company well with around 2000 Casual Users and 150 Power Users. We have a large database and MSI scales well when used with a strong database engine. The issue with Business Objects is the limitation of cubes in a MOLAP approach. You have to pre-define the types of questions to be answered and the cubes have size limits. The cube would add a third layer of aggregation to our environment which brings speed but limits flexibility of queries across business topics. The trend today is toward one large warehouse with a platform that can handle the size. MSI does the best we saw at building complex SQL without requiring users know the tables or SQL language. In effect, some of our analysts became more powerful users once this was in place.

 

[maverick00]

Thanks Toodle,
Do you employ microstrategy as a web tool? How many IT folks work to create the reports for your casual users.

As for BO, I thought Cognos employed the cube?