Deployment Experience

[Andre2]

Hi All
We are close to buying the product but would like some feed back on users deployment experience

Have many of you deployed the product in medium to large enterprises...say 50 to 250 users and if so was the response of your users positive?
Do your reports "behave" themselves in large scale deployments eg: muliple users attempting to access the same report file.
Would providing the reports as .mrt files in a shared dir be the best way to go or should we store the "masters" of each report as binary in a database?

Did you experience any problems with deployment and if so where Stimulsoft quick to respond?

Do you allow users to modify their reports and if so where the users generally positive about this feature?

many thanks for any comments
Andre

[mace242]

Hi All
We are close to buying the product but would like some feed back on users deployment experience

Have many of you deployed the product in medium to large enterprises...say 50 to 250 users and if so was the response of your users positive?
Do your reports "behave" themselves in large scale deployments eg: muliple users attempting to access the same report file.
Would providing the reports as .mrt files in a shared dir be the best way to go or should we store the "masters" of each report as binary in a database?

Did you experience any problems with deployment and if so where Stimulsoft quick to respond?

Do you allow users to modify their reports and if so where the users generally positive about this feature?

many thanks for any comments
Andre

We have just started to deploy to our users. We provide access to mrt files in a shared directory complete with end user design and customisation options. We usually have similar number of clients with several users accessing the reports at the same time - though slightly fewer than you. It all seems to be going fine so far the reports seem to respond as you would expect and times to produce final rendered versions are certainly well within what we would view as acceptable if not good. The design features are aimed at what we would view as "power users" of our system and we have written further guides and documentation to help them (translating geek speak to English in other words) and this seems to be going down well. We have also written a wizard based report creation program to help with the process. We do not install stimul reports into the gac but rather distribute the dlls alongside the app. This seems to be the better way as it allows faster and easier updates.

To cut a long story short - we're more than happy. The support we've had from the staff at Stimulsoft has been first rate and the product has met our wishes and needs well. Certainly better and cheaper and with more support than our previous reporting supplier.

Just for the record we are an independent software house in the UK with no ties at all to Stimulsoft other than being a (happy) customer.

Hope that helps.

[Fabio Pagano]

We too deploy in application directory, not gac.

I've began to officially distribute the programs that use the StimulReport dlls one week ago, after 10 months of hard testing. The program has been distributed to about 150 customers with about 5 pc for anyone in the network - resulting a total of about 750 pc.

At now i've had absolutely no problem of concurrency. Moreover the Stimulsoft dlls are incapsulated in our "spool manager" similar to the IBM as/400 one, so our is a very complex scenario. Often the reports are serialized on disk, no problem on this. For performance i've choosen the way to compile the .mrt file and to use the compiled file for rendering, with great performance improvements (this happens when from the same .mrt file i have to generate many reports with different data).

The users can modify the report in the designer, great feature.

In the past two years i've tested many report engines (Microsoft Reporting Services, Active Reports, XTraReports and so on) but none of them satisfied me (particularly Reporting Services that has a lack of a user designer without Visual Studio, unacceptable, and was very buggy). Then i decided to give up to have a report engine in our software: then i found the StimulReport, hardly tested it and i was completely satisfied for everything.

The support is fantastic.

I'm completely satisfied with StimulReport and, just like mace242, we are an independent software house in South Italy (Bari) "with no ties at all to Stimulsoft other than being a (happy) customer".

Thanks.

[Andre2]

Thankyou to those of you who have replied.
There are a couple of issues that are outstanding with support so we have deffered purchase at this time.

[Andre2]

Hi All
Due to the excellent manner in which issues were responded too we have purchased the product

Many Thanks
Andre

[Edward]

Thank you for the good words. It is true that we are trying to reduce the issues and misunderstandings which especially new customer can meet and to eliminate all of them completely. Our goal is to produce a product which is not only very powerful but also the easiest in getting started with.

We are glad to see you as a new registered customer!

Thank you.