Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) design

Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools is the open source reporting system that GroundWork Open Source, Inc. (http://www.groundworkopensource.com) and IBM (http://www.ibm.com) have chosen to adopt for the development and delivery of the reports into the TCR infrastructure.

BIRT consists of two main components; the report designer, typically run as a plug-in to the popular Eclipse development platform and the runtime component that can be deployed to Java and J2EE application servers. It is this component that is run by the TCR embedded WebSphere Application Server and Groundwork Monitor Foundation Server. However BIRT can be used to create reports for your own web interface. In fact the reports delivered for TBSM are not yet supplied for TCR and are currently only available from the TBSM GUI.

A BIRT report can be defined as a structured document that displays data from an external information system, such as a database or application. Data in the report is organized and formatted so that it is meaningful and useful to the person who reads the report.

If you would like somebody else to write the reports for you we have developed a new report writing service. We will supply a template for you to specify the report you want created, the data you want to access and the method you would like to publish the subsequent report in (e.g. TCR, PDF or your own Intranet). This can either be Tivoli or Groundwork Monitor specific data or include some business related information that you would like to report upon. We will then quote for the creation of the report (either on-site or off-site) and once we have agreed the specification and price we will create the report.