Aldon Widens Reach of Report Manager

Published: June 8, 2010

by Alex Woodie

Organizations will be able to gather development-related data from a wider number of sources with the recently released Aldon Report Manager version 1.1. While the first version of the product that shipped last year was focused primarily on reporting from the i/OS environment, the new release widens the net considerably and allows IT compliance reporting for a range of operating systems, development tools, and change management tools.

Aldon issued the first release of Report Manager last fall as a way to bring a greater level of coherence to the reporting and compliance needs of development projects. Instead of trying to gather the pertinent information off a 5250 screen, Aldon positioned the Web-based Report Manager as a simpler and easier way to gather data.

Now Aldon is doing what you might have expected it to do--make Report Manager applicable to a wider range of customers.

With version 1.1, Report Manager can gather data from all the major platforms, including i/OS, Windows, Linux, and Unix. In terms of integration with change management systems, Report Manager can now can grab information from both the open systems version of Aldon's Lifecycle Manager (called the Enterprise Edition), as well as the i/OS version (called the IBM i edition). If the customer is using (gasp!) change or configuration management system from another vendor, that's OK, too, since Report Manager supports Subversion, Perforce, CVS, and Microsoft's Visual Source Safe and Team Foundation Server. It also supports Aldon's IT help desk offering, called Community Manager.

The idea behind this openness is to make it as easy as possible to get the data needed for proving regulatory compliance with the regulations governing the handling of source code, according to Aldon president Matt Scholl.

"If you are like the majority of IT shops, your IT infrastructure gets more and more complex by the day, which doesn't do your project tracking or compliance audits any favors," Scholl states in a press release. "Pulling information from so many sources becomes a giant time-consuming, hair-pulling burden. We designed Aldon Report Manager to alleviate those burdens and make it easier to gather business intelligence so IT can make better, smarter decisions."

Report Manager 1.1 includes 13 pre-packaged reporting templates for Lifecycle Manager (IBM i Edition) and eight templates for Lifecycle Manager (Enterprise Edition). Users can also design their own queries to gather the required information on their development team's tasks, activities, and releases. The new version also features enhanced date range functionality, Aldon says.

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