The McIntosh Group Selects JReport to Embed in its Project Management Solution for Architectural and Building Projects Successful Deployment with a Fortune 500 Company Moves The McIntosh Group to Make JReport the Standard Reporting Tool for its Project Management Application

Rockville, MD - January 10, 2006 - Based on its recent highly successful deployment in a project for a Fortune 500 company, The McIntosh Group announced today it will make JReport the embedded reporting engine for its project monitoring operations.

The Oklahoma-based McIntosh Group combines expertise in building and architectural project management with information systems development. This combination creates a unique project delivery system that provides clients with the effective business process management framework they need to effectively manage their programs.

The McIntosh Group began their search for an embedded reporting solution after being awarded a multi-million dollar contract with a Fortune 500 Company. The contract involved redesigning facilities and refining process management at more than 700 facilities nationwide.

Because the project was large and locations were widespread, The McIntosh Group assessed that project managers, architects and upper management would need an easy, intuitive way to view project data from both their home offices as well as from any project site. Because end-user requirements varied greatly, the solution needed to be sufficiently flexible and customizable so that each end-user group could view mission-critical information in a way that was meaningful to them.

"JReport was the only reporting solution that provided the flexibility, security, user level access control and ease of embedding that we required," said Kim Barnes, an IT/Program Manager with the McIntosh Group. "Our positive experience deploying JReport with our client confirmed our research about JReport. We feel it's the best reporting solution on the market today."

JReport was the only 100% Java reporting solution that provided the ad-hoc report creation functionality that the end-users demanded. Further, JReport offers an intuitive, Web-based interface that can be easily accessed anywhere in the world.

"JReport was the perfect solution for the redesign project for this Fortune 500 company. For a project of this scale and diversity, The McIntosh Group required significant flexibility from its reporting offering," said John Gularson, executive vice president of operations for Jinfonet. "In addition to flexibility, JReport provides easy integration, scalability and minimal development and training costs."

JReport enables users to customize reports in real-time by defining or modifying report parameters at run time to maximize the report's relevance to the underlying application. Once deployed, reports are fully actionable; users can search, sort or filter data. They can also drill up, down or across data to see summary information, details, or scope.

JReport Customer Care Portal is Now Beta! New Web Site will Help Customers Get the Most Out of JReport

Jinfonet strives for quality products and exceptional support. In pursuit of the goal of providing our customers with exceptional support, we are currently beta-testing with our new self-service Customer Care Portal. 

The Customer Care Portal is a web-based resource that will provide a high degree of added value to customers by organizing and summarizing a wide range of JReport information, frequently asked questions (FAQs) and tips designed to maximize the performance of our JReport products.

The objective of the Customer Care Portal is to make it easy for both first-time users and expert users of JReport to realize its full potential and navigate the Java/J2EE embedded reporting landscape. The Portal allows customers to have access to technical information without having to contact a JReport Technical Support Engineer. The Customer Support Portal is available to all JReport customers who are current on their maintenance. 

This web site will be a collaboration between the technical experts at Jinfonet and actual users of the products. JReport users will be able to submit frequently asked questions that will be answered by technical experts. The FAQs will be archived on the site and accessible to other users. Users can access these FAQs and even evaluate the value of the answer or add additional questions or amendments by using the feedback form next to each question. This knowledge base will continue to grow and evolve to ultimately provide a powerful support resource for our customers.

The Portal will also have a sections for: JReport downloads and product updates; information on the available professional services; and contact information for customer support.

"Making our customers successful is very important to Jinfonet. We're providing the Customer Care Portal to further demonstrate our already high commitment to customer service," stated Fred Richards, vice president of marketing for Jinfonet.

The Customer Care Portal section will be available within the month.

Beta Test the New Customer Care Portal:

Jinfonet is now offering an opportunity to participate in a beta test for the new customer care portal. Please Contact us to find out more details.

Tech Tip: JReport's Relative Path Root Folder

When you install JReport (either JReport Designer or JReport Enterprise Server), a default relative path root folder is created. Objects, such as images and text files, can be stored directly in this relative path or subfolders within the relative path. When a Report Designer wants to utilize objects within this folder, they can simply reference the subfolder (if relevant), and image name instead of the entire path.

For example, JReport provides a built-in function called openBinFile(), which is used to open files from the local disk. In this case, the Report Designer will be calling an image file.

Without using the Relative Path Root Folder, the Report Designer must define the full physical path, including the subfolder that contains the images and the image file name.

openBinFile("D:\My Images\JReport Images\mypic.jpg")

This approach is cumbersome, as report designers must always maintain and modify actual paths, and constrains deployment to other machines and environments.

The better approach is to take advantage of JReport's Relative Path Root Folder. In a standard JReport installation, the following Relative Path Root Folder is created:

%installroot_JReportProduct%\bin directory.

When images are saved in the default relative path, the Report Designer only has to identify the subfolder name and image name, as seen below:

openBinFile("\images\mypic.jpg")

This feature is very useful when reports are created on one machine or environment and deployed to another machine or environment. Since the default relative path always exists, objects within this path can be called regardless of where the report is deployed. Report Designers state that among many other JReport features, Relative Path Root Folder offers the flexibility and practicality required for real-life report development and deployment scenarios.