Entrinsik's Informer - a valuable reporting tool
May 09, 2016
Entrinsik's Informer - a valuable reporting tool
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Entrinsik Informer
We use Entrinsik's Informer for the majority of our reporting from the Student Information System. Informer is used by virtually every department on campus for ad-hoc reporting and for scheduled reports. The types of reports include nightly audit reports, extracts that are then used to feed other systems, and traditional reports designed to track progress for the different business needs of the various offices across campus.
- Simple user-interface: Informer is relatively easy to learn and end users can begin running reports and creating new reports quickly.
- Email "burst" functionality: This feature allows emails to be sent out based on data in the report. So for example, a report could be scheduled that would email all student employment managers listing out the specific employees that report to them that haven't submitted their time sheets. Each manager would only see the rows that correspond to their email address.
- Analytics and grouping: Users can quickly drag columns to group and sub-total, and can use the analytics tab to get deeper insights into the data.
- Performance is sometimes an issue. This can usually be overcome by re-designing the report - using fewer fields, using indexed fields etc.
- The java script calculated fields are overall a good feature, but they can be difficult to work with as some true javascript syntax is not supported due to the architecture used.
- QueryBuilder and SSRS
Informer is much better than the old QueryBuilder tool that was a part of the Colleague interface. Schools using SQL Server for the back end may want to weigh the pros and cons between Informer and SSRS (Sql Server Reporting Services) since SSRS comes with no extra costs in that database solution. I think the easy learning curve and the ability to report against multiple data sources of different types gives Informer the advantage.