Unisa has installed SQRIBE`s SQR ReportWriter and SQR Workbench for Windows 95/NT to manage reporting for the entire university. Both products were supplied by sole South African SQR distributor Abraxas Software.
With 117 000 students and 3 400 staff, Unisa is the largest university in South Africa and one of the largest distance education institutions in the world.
The university`s staff need to access the university databases easily in order to obtain information about students to assist them in planning and administration.
"Among other things, we needed a report writer with strong local support, and easy integration with the operating environment," says Vic Stipinovich, technical director of the university`s Department of Computer Services. "The database administration staff, system administration staff and contracting staff looked at a list of 15 report writers and finally chose SQR Server and SQR Workbench."
SQR Server is an industrial-strength engine for extracting, transforming and distributing data throughout the enterprise. It simplifies information delivery and satisfies the immediate demands for mission-critical business information.
"It is also the only solution with native access to every major database, combined with procedural extensions to SQL and optimised for data extraction and manipulation," says Abraxas director Danie de Jager.
"SQR Workbench provides IS professionals, application developers and power users with a graphical development environment for designing, executing, and viewing portable, high-performance, enterprise reports," he says.
"It combines graphical development tools to provide an integrated environment for producing reports of any complexity from databases of any size. Whether you are creating budgets, building exception reports, producing invoices from millions of records, or writing cheques for an entire organisation, SQR Workbench can help you do it faster, more accurately and more reliably."
SQR simplifies the development of enterprise reports. Its layout, code generation, editing, and viewing tools automate the report development process.
Unisa has an unlimited unrestricted deployment licence. Although the campus has offices throughout South Africa, the administration systems are centralised in Pretoria. There are three main SQR user groups totalling 150 IT staff, including a technical group tasked with formulating and manipulating management or business information.
"SQR has been fully integrated into the operating environment," adds Stipinovich. "We are satisfied with the results we have obtained."
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