ERP users always wanted more and more reports to suit their everyday and adhoc requirements. BIRT is an solution for an average user, who know how to use MOUSE. This is highly flexible tool, which can be mastered in few hours. Information is the lifeblood of an organization. What's interesting is that organizations are focusing on empowering workers across the enterprise by providing them with new software tools. Managers need to think about how they fit into a distributed, supply-chain dominated enterprise in ways that were never apparent before.
BIRT is an open source Java reporting platform, which can be deployed with report specific libraries and templates for easy development of reports. With BIRT, we define a SQL query that pulls data, and then use a drag-and-drop report creation interface to design the report. The report is generated in HTML / PDF, which can be saved to disk, print or export as an Excel file. For most reporting requirements, the default element names will be just enough. BIRT is not limited to functionality buried in the application; rather it is an extensible reporting framework which can be used to maximize corporate reporting requirements.
Organizations across industries are realizing the business benefits that come from bringing customers, partners, and employees closer to the information that drives day-to-day business operations. BIRT reporting can help to reduce costs, improve customer service, and create new revenue streams by delivering the right information to the right people in real-time.
Using Tomcat 5.5.11, I could deploy many reports in just few days of work. The scalability is also very good, when it comes to large number of users.
