Generating reports from Project 2003?

[Nock]

I am in the process of determining the appropriate reporting tool for our
Program Office. We have approximately 25 PM's who report back weekly to a
Program Manager.

Presently, PM's are expected to manually create large, rather cumbersome
Excel spreadsheet (risks, issues, dependancies, milestones, costs & inserted
excel graphs) each week. This is obviously a fairly manually intensive task
and I'd like to be able to automate the entire process - a big ask I know.

Has anyone used SQL reporting services, the Proj Prof XML Reporting Wizard,
cubes, RDL Components, SQL Queries, Crystal Reports, .NET or combinations of
these to produce reports of this nature?

I'm a little overwhelmed by the sheer volume of possibilities! Any feedback
is most welcome!

Many, many thanks,

Nock

 

[William Raymond [MVP]]

Hi Nock,

I like simplicity. Here are my thoughts:

1) Do you need access to large-scale amounts of data summarized (i.e.
resource utilization over a 6 month period, sliced/diced by business unit
and resource skills)? And/or is it okay that the data is not real-time? Use
the OLAP Cube. If the data you want is not there, extend the cube. Below
is the link to the Project Server 2003 SDK to read up on extending the cube:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...8c-8bca-4db9-8753-178c0d3099c5&DisplayLang=en

2) Anything else... use SQL Reporting Services (SRS). If possible, use SQL
Reporting Services 2005. I believe you need to purchase a SQL 2005 license,
but SRS 2005 can still access SQL 2000 data just fine.

Why SRS over all the other solutions? Because it is web-based, has built-in
security, is tied to the Visual Studio platform and can be generated in: The
SRS Reporting Front-end, SharePoint as a web-part, an application. It can
also automatically send e-mails with the attached report and supports output
to PDF, Excel, HTML and other formats.


-Bill