Business Objects vs SSRS vs A.N.Other

[davetherave2]

Just wondering if there is anyone out there that can comment on the following products.

Currently we used a very old version of SSRS 2005 although currently trialing SSRS 2012 and it is a technology that I have worked with now for several years and feel fairly comfortable with.

As part of another project I am working on we have a licenese for Business Objects and my boss wants to use this as our preferred reporting platform as it is meant to be better and is a technology he is familiar with (although a version about 5+ years old)

Now we have a number of considerations to take into account here on the data that will be reported.

1) The databases being used are not well rationalised and do not enforce any sort of foriegn-key constraints (although I know what tables link to which)
2) The combined database sizes are 25gb+
3) The business objects platform is on another site so all data will be held on our site and we would push data down periodically to update the business object's universe
4) No OLAP cube or any other such model exsists for our database
5) The system should be easy for end users to build reports rather than me doing it.


Now the other solution is to build something bespoke and highly engaging and leverage the advances in SSRS 2012 and other .net technologies such as Telerik's reporting controls, mvc, silverlight etc to generate a highly interactive and customised solution.

So just wondering what others have done and why they went down the path they did or is there an alternative solution.

 

[Dolph]

All three options have their good and bad points, but if you want the users to be able to build their own reports (as opposed to just changing dates etc) and you have a complicated data structure, Business objects tends to be the easiest to teach people (at least in my experience), especially if you go with well constructed universes designed to make it easy (which obviously has flexibility and/or speed trade offs).

SSRS is nice to use but seems to be a lot less user friendly if you're not a datageek, which can have implications in terms of getting the end users to do their own report builds.

With your considerations, the database size shouldn't really matter, and unless you're adding massive amounts of information each day, pushing data between systems shouldn't be an issue for most companies. With regards to the rationalisation, you can control that in either system to a point in terms of what you expose to the end users.

I'd probably shy away from the custom built system, they always have the potential to be heavily reliant on a single individual (far more than industry standard software where at least you can search the web etc if you need support), and unless you need to do something that the off the shelf solutions can't do, it just seems a lot of work to reinvent the wheel.

 

[davetherave2]

Thanks for the reply.

I guess it will be a long and drawn out evaluation to see how each will compare.

I am currently in the process of trying to get the database re-engineered from the ground up as it is horrible and overly reliant of me knowing how the entire database is held together (I inherited this from the previous development team and have been nursing it for several years.)

I think with what ever solution is chosen I will still probably end up creating 90% of the reports required.

When I say a custom built solution I am looking at the solutions provided as part of Telerik's reporting solution which is very similar from the quick glance I have had to SSRS.

I understand that each option has its pros and cons but first thing for me is to fix the database.

Thanks again for giving me some more food for thought.