Bellamy Software Partners with Jinfonet to Embed JReport into its Financial Management Software Suite

Jinfonet has entered into a partnership with Canadian-based Bellamy Software to embed JReport, Jinfonet's powerful Web-based reporting solution, into Bellamy's financial suite of products.

Bellamy offers a feature-rich financial management software that helps it clients process receipts, payments, and payroll and fulfill internal and external reporting responsibilities. It also provides software, hardware, and training to local government agencies, school boards and utilities to help them better manage their organizations.

After conducting an extensive, six-month search of all the major business intelligence and embedded reporting vendors, Bellamy concluded that JReport was the best option for its reporting needs. Said Ken Shelton, general manager for Bellamy Software, "We spent a lot of time looking for the best offering. Reporting is a critically important component for our financial suite. JReport was rated very highly in Gartner's Magic Quadrant, and our own research confirmed it."

Bellamy's Customers Will Benefit from JReports' Out-of-the-Box, Easy-to-Use Reporting Functionality.

"End users can quickly realize the benefits of JReport because reports are delivered through a familiar Web interface," said John Gularson, executive vice president at Jinfonet. "Bellamy was heavily focused on ease-of-use and flexibility. Bellamy's ultimate goal was to give their end users an effective reporting tool that would make their jobs easier."

Internally Bellamy needed its reporting solution to be J2EE compatible and easily embedded into their IBM framework. JReport met these requirements due to its 100% Java-based architecture. Because JReport does not have to be administered as a separate application time and resource-intensive application management is greatly reduced. A major plus for Bellamy.

Bellamy was also looking to establish a long-term alliance that would allow them to develop Web-based reporting for their other software solutions. This new alliance with Jinfonet will make Bellamy's financial tools even more powerful and will soon be enhancing its other offerings for its clients well into the future.

Customer Update: JReport Ensures Accuracy and Responsiveness of Bell Canada's 9-1-1 Emergency Aid Dispatching

Bell Canada is the country's largest telecommunications company with over 13 million local lines. When it needed a robust and reliable reporting solution for its critical 9-1-1 system, it turned to Jinfonet.

Bell Canada evaluated reporting solutions from Crystal Decisions and Jinfonet. "JReport was the best choice for us," says Francis Bourgault, security manager for Bell Canada's 9-1-1 emergency service. "JReport integrated easier, scaled better, and was easier to customize than any of the other solutions we considered."

Bell Canada's commitment to its customers includes offering a reliable and fast 9-1-1 emergency response system. The 9-1-1 system required a dedicated telecommunications network working in conjunction with municipal governments. In addition, a number of databases and processes were set up to ensure the service functioned as designed. The integrity and accuracy of Bell Canada's customer database is critical to ensuring the system works correctly. To address both accuracy and efficiency in the system's early stages, Bell Canada built a proprietary data platform that facilitated report generation and scheduled system and database updates.

As the 9-1-1 service expanded the workload required to constantly manage subscriber line data and ensure call routing accuracy became more time intensive and harder to manage. Bell's need for a more robust system to generate reports so they could monitor system effectiveness and update data was clear. Enter JReport.

Bell Canada easily deployed JReport enterprise-wide and designed over 50 reports to improve data collection and analysis. Over time, the system has scaled to over 200 users accessing over 180 reports daily.

Seamlessly integrated as a servlet within Bell Canada's 9-1-1 emergency system, JReport is used to generate daily transaction reports and to deliver those results to data analysts via the web. As this transaction data is analyzed, Bell Canada is able to identify bad information, like incorrect addresses, that could result in misrouting emergency calls.

Depending on the particular user's needs, JReport generates transaction reports in any of several different formats. For quick views of data, Bell Canada outputs reports in HTML or PDF format. For more detailed analysis and in order to modify data errors and create a log of modifications, Bell Canada uses JReport to output data in Excel format.

Bell Canada has stated that JReport produces most reports in less than a minute, saving time and enabling Bell Canada to correct bad data as quickly as possible thereby helping to greatly improve the safety and well being of its customers.

Tech Tip of the Month: Create User Defined DHTML Skin

JReport DHTML provides four types of skins to control the DHTML look and feel: Windows, Windows XP, Standard and OS theme. If none of these fits your requirement, you may create your own skin and apply it to DHTML. You can follow the steps below to hook up the customized skin to DHTML.

1. Create a new directory under "%ServerHome%\public_html\dhtmljsp" (must under this folder), for example "myskin". The path would look like: "%ServerHome%\public_html\dhtmljsp\myskin".
2. Create "css", "images" and "js" folder under: "%ServerHome%\public_html\dhtmljsp\myskin".
3. Create the css, images and JavaScript files and save to corresponding folder under: "%ServerHome%\public_html\dhtmljsp\myskin". You may also copy the existing files from Windows XP, Standard or OS theme and make the modifications.
4. Modify "%ServerHome%\public_html\dhtmljsp\skin.txt" and add the customized skin as the first choice in the file. For example, the file would look like this:
   

   My Skin=myskin Standard=standard Windows= Windows XP=xp OS theme=theme

   Left value is skin display name, and right value is skin folder name. Since you add the customized skin as the first line, DHTML will use it as the default skin.
5. Save all files and start JReport Enterprise Server.

JReport Product Update

JReport 7.2 will be Generally Available (GA) on 12/2/2005. Below is a sample of the product enhancements that will be included:

• Self-contained JReport Enterprise Server package - Self-contained WAR/EAR file containing all necessary Server runtime environment information, can be automatically generated during installation.
• JNDI Database Support - J2EE JNDI Datasource as a report data source in a JReport Enterprise Server integrated environment and a JReport Enterprise Server system database.
• Saving DHTML report results locally - User can save report results from DHTML to local client machine.
• One-step export - DHTML functionality to export reports to other formats in one step using icons on the toolbar.
• Export to Excel Enhancement - Object-level management of merged cells and object export across multiple merged cells.