I have been through the development or installation of many reporting systems. For each, we paid careful attention to the classification system we used for the reports. Typical considerations for a reporting taxonomy include: Department/Functional Area, Report Type (e.g. Financial vs. Operational), Report Granularity (e.g. Summary vs. Detail), Point of View (e.g. customer focus, supplier focus, management focus, etc.), and on and on.
However, in the end, most people will look at all the reports they have permissions to see, and decide whether it is of interest and/or helps him or her do their job. They then want a way to put these reports (or links to them) in one place so they can easily find them in the future.
So, ultimately, the taxonomy is important for users to discover reports, but the most important oranizational element is the "My Reports" folder.
I believe I can do this in Report Portal, but have some questions. I believe what we have to do is create a folder for each user and assign them (and only them) publisher rights on the folder.
Question #1: Can this be automated/scripted in some way? We (like most, I'd guess), are attempting to integrate RP & NT (Active Directory) security. I'd like to at a minimum export my user list and import them (along with their groups) and automatically create and assign appropriate permissions to their individual folders.
Question #2 requires some background. Report Portal has 3 roles that govern functionality within the product: Reader, Publisher, & Approver. There are also 2 global roles Admin & Writer that I'll ignore for the moment. Our company (and probably most others) assigns file permissions (via AD) on a department/function basis, e.g. Marketing, Engineering, Finance, Management, etc.
What I'd like to do is cross the two dimensions of this matrix: Report Portal role X Department, because this seems to me the most appropriate way to manage permissions. As a result, I'd have Marketing Reader, Marketing Publisher, Marketing Approver, Engineering Reader, Engineering Publisher, Engineering Approver, etc.
This brings us to question #2: Can this "crossing" of NT Group and RP role be automated?
Question #3 is the big one: Now that I've got all of the Personal folders set up, and after I assign users to these roles and roles to reports, I'd like to automatically populate each user's Personal folder with a series of links to their "default" reports based on their group membership. Can this be done?
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Report Portal
Organizing Reports
Posted - 01/20/2005 : 11:35:40
