One of the biggest headaches for any reporting unit like institutional research, is maintaining web sites that push out information to constituents. On a bigger scale, the whole institution has a similar problem. Nowadays a content management system (CMS) is pretty much required to maintain sanity. These packages, like drupal or joomla (both open source), will help separate design from content--a big step in the right direction. But that still leaves the problem of generating reports (often dynamically) and getting them on web pages in a suitable format.
In the past I've relied on custom code for this sort of thing, but that is not maintainable past a certain scale. So I was interested to read an article in Campus Technology about a product called bluenog that integrates a CMS with reporting functions (they call it business intelligence, but it looks more like reporting to me) and a portal designer to boot, all integrated. The demo videos look interesting, but don't give a lot of detail. I found a review here (which led me off to read about other interesting web 2.o worksavers like this). The Bluenog company has an interesting business model--they sell you the software, but then give you the source code. I'm downloading it to give it a spin tonight. It's over 700mb for the full (trial) version.
Update: After installing the trial version of their ICE (integrated system), and playing with it for a while, I think it's more complicated than what I'm looking for. I can see using this in a very large installation, but my head is swimming at the development complexity of the thing. Maybe I've misjudged it, however, and will continue to play around with it for a few days.
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