Nintex Reporting Eases MOSS Administration

Having trouble administrating your SharePoint environment? Nintex has developed a reporting solution to help ease your pain. Nintex Reporting 2008 is designed to improve governance and adoption of SharePoint. Nintex is known for developing solutions that support the SharePoint platform, including advanced workflow and a podcast server. Their recognition of the need for better administration reporting in SharePoint demonstrates their understanding of the platform.

A Look at Nintex Reporting 2008

Nintext Reporting 2008 can be installed and used with either Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or MOSS. It's completely browser-based, so there's no desktop software that needs to be installed and configured.

Nintex Reporting home page

Reporting provides real-time insight into what's happening in the SharePoint environment. Things such as site structure, content and usage data can be viewed -- all to help monitor, capacity plan and basically govern what is happening in the environment. Reporting Categories include: * Dashboards * Activity * Documents * Lists and Discussions * Management * Performance * Search * Site * Storage * User

User Reports

Each Category contains a number of reports you can view. You can subscribe to specific reports or export them to excel or pdf. Something very nice about this reporting software is that is goes across SharePoint sites and Farms. It's centrally installed and its repository is centralized so you can get a unified view of what's happening across the entire SharePoint environment.

Rich Interactive Charting

There are over 75 rich interactive charts and graphs out of the box built using Microsoft's Silverlight technology. There's also the ability to drill-down into a chart or graph for more granular information.

Role Based Dashboards

You can utilize a number of role-based dashboards for IT Managers, Knowledge Managers, Business Executives or Team site Owners.

Knowledge Manager Dashboard

IT Manager Dashboard

What this means is that you can customize the reporting data that is displayed to different types of users. So this is not just an IT Admin reporting tool -- it's also a business user reporting tool. Standard SharePoint permissions can be used to define access rights to individual reports or dashboards.

Customizable Reports Out of the Box

You can customize all the reports that come with the software. This is done via a special web page interface that will allow you to select different parameters and personalization options. Administrators can create even more advanced reporting configuration by editing XML report definition files.

Time Intelligence

Another nice feature of the Nintex Reporting is the ability to view reports on data that has been removed from the SharePoint environment.

The Nintex Reporting Business Intelligence service collects snapshots of the the data - thus enabling the reporting of trends and data history. You can download a trial of the software or try it online. If you want more personalized support, then request a demo. We did a quick run through of the online trial and think the product is very nice, easy to use and understand. There's not a huge amount of data to view reports on, but you can easily see all the options and move around the tool. Pricing starts at US$ 8,750 for a single server license. Licensing for a web farm installation of Nintex Reporting 2008 is US$ 17,500.