Crystal Reports, AFACTS and GT Reports (reports.gatech.edu)

AFACTS, campus-wide Crystal Reports and other local reports are now being served by GT Reports.

What is it?

GT Reports is a web application that primarily stores Crystal Reports and other business intelligence documents used by faculty, staff and researchers to make important decisions.  It replaces the need to have Crystal Professional locally installed on users' desktops and sensitive data stored on their machines.  Georgia Tech's need for on-demand decision making tools and enterprise reporting has evolved over the years from very creative Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint slides to highly complex Crystal reports. Data was often hard to access and not readily available. GT Reports is one of Georgia Tech's decision empowering tools that enables everyday users to run on-demand reports written against complex enterprise databases securely from the web. Reports can be scheduled to run at specified intervals and made available on-demand or accessible as a dashboard in your favorite portal.  Security access controls can be granularly implemented so only specific audiences can view confidential reports. The technology behind the scenes is based on the SAP Business Objects XI solution which now helps drive Georgia Tech into the realm of making business intelligence easy, fast and secure.

What do users see?

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Access:

Faculty, Staff and Researchers are granted access to reports they need by the Data Stewards and may request access through their designated unit requestors .  If you need access to AFACTs, you will need to go through the Registrar's office.  If you think there is data stored in GT Reports that you need and are unsure who to ask, perhaps one of the following folder owners might be able to help guide you.  Folder Owners are the folks who upload reports into GT Reports and manage the folder's content, but are not necessarily Data Stewards or the data owners themselves.  Here are the current folder owners :

Requirements:

To use GT Reports you need to have been granted access to a particular report and your computer has to be configured and properly secured.  It is very important that you work closely with your local computer support or OIT to ensure your system meets the following application requirements:

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Technical Information:

GT Reports is a Java based application.  Given the fact that many departments have many different java based applications with varying requirements, it is important to note that as being one of the first places to check for resolving application issues.  Please ensure that a user's machine has one java runtime environment if possible or that you specifically configure their browser to only use one JRE if necessary.  Please also ensure that you remove any unnecessary browser toolbars and 3rd party plugins.

It is also noteworthy that users have the ability to change their preferences, which changes the behavior of the application.  For example, a user might choose to have their session utilize Active-X print controls instead of a PDF based mechanism which would require that they then use IE and also have administrator privileges to install the component.  Here's a screenshot of some preferences users can change or you can use to troubleshoot application issues:

We also would like to give you more insight as to the architecture behind the scenes, so here is a diagram:

Functional User Guides and Training Information:

A few folder owners provide functional guides to assist their users while using GT Reports.  You need to contact your respective folder owner to find out information about running the reports stored in their folders.  AFACTS is one folder where Dana Hartley has done a very good job communicating the reporting workflow for that service and providing a wealth of information.  Please contact Dana Hartley for more information about AFACTS or visit the site:

AFACTS.GATECH.EDU