I just had an epiphany! (So everyone, go ahead and send me 50 links that I personally have yet to run across where others have already suggested this. :)
I’ve always wanted to review key numbers related to my company’s permformance on a periodic basis; i.e. each day, each week, and each month, etc. I know this is needed by almost every person in almost every company. One method is to create an “intranet dashboard.“ But I find I am personally more projected-focused and don’t look at my dashboard consistently enough. Another is to send an email, but then I have to “manage“ those emails in additional to all my other emails; yuck!
My epiphany was to create a single RSS feed for periodic report distribution. When the report server generates the report, it would get pulled down by my SharpReader and a Outlook-style notification pop-up would tell me about it if I’m at the PC otherwise next time I look at my reader I’ll see the new report and be able to review it. There would be no need for me to manage those reports because they’d all be on the feed and stay there until my configured expire date, which could be different for daily, weekly, and monthly reports. If I wanted a report that had dropped off my reader, I’d just go run the report like I currently do today.
Implementation wise, there would just be an “item” table in a SQL Server database where generated reports would be dumped by scheduled tasks. The item table could have a “category” field that would also allow subset feeds for each category. Super simple.
Is this idea cool or what? :-) Maybe I should track down the SQL Server Reporting Services guys and ask them to consider for v1.1? Or maybe some SQL Server guru somewhere could just write a custom output format and custom delivery target and publish an article somewhere?
