If a business needed to connect to a various database and generate PDF mostly reports, what are some good tools. Commercial or Opensource. Non technical users should also be able to generate various reports with good looking charts and tabular data through a report designer tool. As well, we should be able to deploy these charts on the web and generate HTML or PDF.
We looked at various tools like Adobe LiveCycle and haven’t looked at Crystal Reports.
I am more the technical person and not really the business guy and I would mind something more techie like Eclipse’s BIRT (business reporting tool). Everything looks good with Birt and does exactly what we might need but the charts don’t look that impressive.
And with Crystal Reports, once you bring in those vendors, they sell a bunch of stuff that you normally don’t need and it is impossible to get stuff done. But I could be wrong.
Commercial and for large applications:
BI Publisher