UCCX 8.5 - Customized Historical Reports Application

Question

Hello.
We are implementing a Proof of Concept call center at a client and one of the main concers they have is reporting. After speaking with the supervisors, we've seen that the default reports in HRC will not be adequate, so they would need customized reports.
I know that Cisco recommends Crystal Reports, the supervisors in the call center would like to create reports themselves, as the paramaters that they need to evaluate through reports change rapidly and just want to do create reports on the fly. But as far as we've seen throught in-house testing of Crystal Reports, that for them you need quite a bit of understanding of the UCCX database and databases in general, which the supervisors at the client don't have. So I'm looking for an end user friendly alternative to Crystal Reports.
I've rummugaed around the web a bit and so far I found
SimpliCTI: http://www.simplicti.com/web3/content/view/31/37/
that looks rather promising, but from the documentation that is available on the web it still doesn't look like it would do the job, and of course, cost is also a factor.
So, my question is, does anyone have more info on those two systems and/or know of any application or system that would allow a user that doesn't have an in-depth understanding of the database and relationship of the data to make customized reports, or is the use of Crystal Reports the only (or best) way to do it?
Thank you very much in advanced.
Regards,
Denis Stražar

Answer 1

Yeah, sorry to disappoint but not really. The documented process for creating an HRC report including the ODBC connection, Crystal RPT file, XML files needed for the new RPT file to appear in the HRC, and Informix stored procedure remain unchanged. To do this you would need Crystal Developer 11.5 as well as AGS ServerStudio to create a new stored procedure. None of this is user-friendly.
As for CUIC the story differs slightly. CUIC has some inherent advantages, including the ability to tweak the views of an existing report per-user but developer knowledge is still required to create a new entirely new report. In the case of CUIC you must get a lab/NFR copy of CUIC Premium and install this on a separate server. You then bind that CUIC Premium installation to CCX using ODBC and create the report definition there. You still end up creating a stored procedure on CCX using ServerStudio. When finished you export the report definition file from the CUIC Premium server and import it to the embedded CUIC Standard instance installed with CCX. Only CUIC Premium can build a new report but acutally using Premium in production has something like a $25k cost per-server.
This has been a sore topic; many of us expected the story to improve with CUIC. While it has in many other aspects the concept of report generation remains rather complicated. The BU's viewpoint is that creating reports, and more to the point stored procedures, incorrectly can seriously impact system performance or even corrupt data . They only want the Cisco partner or customers with DBA-level skill sets to be building reports, testing them on non-production environments, and then importing them into production. Presumably the idea was for partners to build and test once, then sell repeatedly.
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