Its in vogue, calling yourself a Web 2.0 application, site or enterprise, but I really wonder if I touched the tip of the iceberg sometime back.
About two years ago I worked on a compliance management product that had reports. The team developing the application, suggested about 10 presets for 21 reports on the system.
A preset was basically a combination of reports with filter criteria and actions at the end. For example you could have a report on audits completed before a deadline date by people who were users in the systems with more than 100 customers.
The report could then be mailed to a Compliance Auditor or a trigger gets sent automatically informing users that they need to fill in their forms.
I differed and was suggesting them a collaborative approach where there were no reports on the system. Manager level users could create reports collaboratively and save them as presets. As a rule any manager user could create report combinations that anyone could access and define others as private.
The suggestion was turned down as most reporting systems done by the developers and managers involved either presets or only steps to generate a report and not giving user the control of combinations, let alone share them.
Over a period of time, the presets ran out of steam. The product had a vast range of reports and different combinations for different users. Most users were creating reports for themselves, which were same and in some case communicating report settings to juniors, all that was required was “share report”.
We built a collaborative reporting system later but the thought was always there, a web 2.0 perhaps.
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