JinfoNEWS April 2009 CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT: Passkey Shortens Their Report Development Lifecycle with JReport The Challenge For Passkey, a leading online group reservation system provider, reporting is vital to their business. Not only do their customers rely on reports to perform critical business functions around managing group reservations, but internally Passkey uses reports to analyze each of their accounts and stay on top of things. Initially, Passkey implemented an in-house solution which suited their needs for a time. As their business grew, their home-grown solution became difficult to maintain and the demand for new reports and features took longer to get to production. There was also an increasing need for new reports and new ways to present them. Each of these factors contributed to the decision to search for an enterprise solution that would remedy the situation. So they began their search for an out-of-the-box solution which could address some of the complexity involved in report creation, testing, and deployment. The Solution Passkey narrowed down the vendors they would be evaluating to one open-source product and three commercial products—one of which was JReport. They determined that the capabilities required of their product of choice were: Reduction in report development, testing, and deployment times Designer tools to create graphical drill down reports The ability to export a report in various standard formats once it's been created Maintaining compliance with their current security measures Performance A JavaEE compliant architecture Upon completing their evaluation of each of the products, Passkey decided that JReport met these requirements with ease. Besides being feature rich and user friendly, JReport's simple integration and superior security model put it ahead of its competitors. Himanshu Roongta, an Architect at Passkey, adds that "One of the key advantages we saw was the usage flexibility of User Defined Data Source (UDS). For the most part, it allowed our legacy report backend logic to be re-used with the new reporting engine." The Result With JReport, Passkey was able to easily integrate a new reporting solution that worked within their security restrictions. It provided exactly what their customers were looking for—an out-of-the-box export feature in various formats to suite their needs. In addition to being able to create reports on the fly, the development lifecycle of new reports was reduced significantly from months to just a few weeks. Recently, Passkey launched "Event Dashboards" for their customers—powered by JReport. With "Event Dashboards", much of the information and intelligence that their customers need is now served up in a user-friendly, web-based dashboard that includes information from multiple report sources. This not only saves them a great deal of time and effort, but it also provides them with timely and actionable information.