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Ask HN: sql reporting service ui replacement

2 points by Thunderke ↗ HN
(english is not my native language but i'll do my best) for the first time in long i got a startup idea but i want to know if there is a market for this.

so as the title sugested i want to make a ui replacement for sql reporting service mainly because the native one cannot even run desent on ff or chrome. the idea is to create a site where you can put in your server url, username and pass and then you can browse all the reports from either my website or through an iframe on there own site.

i like to know your thoughts about this idea.

1 comment

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smiler
Reporting Services is mostly used in corporate environments. It's included with SQL Server, which means to buy your product, you will have to have a significantly better product for people to consider purchasing it.

Here are some other concerns

- Most Reporting services installations are on corporate intranets. Being able to access it through your website is a no-go

- You've identified that they don't display in FF or Chrome very well. Companies using Reporting Services are most likely using IE on the desktop, so they don't care about FF or Chrome

Here are some of my own pain points from using it

- It currently does not support multi-language reports, so it requires a separate report for each language (!)

- Deployment is a bit of a headache

- Each new release of Visual Studio is not compatible with old versions of reporting services projects - that's a development pain

Here is your competition

www.dundas.com

You notice their pricing is not on their website, I had a quote and it was over $20,000 for a 20 user runtime licence and 1 developer licence. Obviously it is a very mature and complete product.

I wish you every success. Have you got clients who are using Reporting Services and finding it a pain? Find out what their problems are and write something which fixes them.