Drowning in Ad-Hoc Reports? Get Entrinsik Informer!
May 06, 2016
Drowning in Ad-Hoc Reports? Get Entrinsik Informer!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Entrinsik Informer
We use Entrinsik Informer as our reporting tool for our student information system. Any employee may request to be a user for Informer, but we really only have a select group of employees that use it regularly (including myself). We migrated to Informer due to Datatel (now Ellucian) eliminating Query Builder for reporting. Now that we have Informer, it is easier for end-users to create their own reports, which reduces the need to involve IT and thus the end-users get the data they need in a more timely manner.
- Informer is pretty user-friendly. When teaching other employees how to use Informer, I typically don't have to repeat any steps or further explain how to do certain tasks because of how user-friendly it is.
- Reports in Informer are kept in a list that can be filtered by user, specific tags, or even by how recent the report was made or run. This makes it very quick and easy to find and run a specific report.
- Informer has many options for downloading the report output, including text (txt), comma separated values (csv), and even PDF.
- There are a lot of reports that we have in Informer that say they have never been run, even though I know they have been run. So that makes it really difficult to determine which reports can be deleted to keep a tidy report list.
- The only other complaint I have about Informer is that there doesn't seem to be a properly detailed error code/message when the student information system can't be accessed. For example, I am currently trying to move Informer to its own standalone server and I get an error message saying that our license isn't valid. Informer Support sent a new license, which prompted the same message, and the only explanation they have given me is that Informer can't reach the student information system. I would think that if that were the case, the error message would say that instead of an invalid license.
We needed to implement a new reporting tool due to Query Builder being eliminated. We went with Entrinsik Informer because it was already being used at some other Colleges that were also using Datatel/Ellucian Colleague, and the reviews from those Colleges were very positive. A couple of selling points for us were that it is a web application (eliminates the need for IT to install and update an application on each user's PC) and that it was user-friendly enough for end-users to make their own reports.