Publish Reports to Web Portals

DocumentBurster is often used by people as a simple way to automatically publish reports to (web) portals.

Microsoft SharePoint is a common choice to publish reports online however other vendors are supported including IBM WebSphere Portal, Oracle Portal, SAP NetWeaver or Tibco Portal.

Possible Use Cases

Imagine you have a corporate portal and at the end of each month you publish the individual payslips for each of your (many) employees to login and check their own income report? Would this be helpful?

Similarly you can publish bills for your customers, invoices and statements for your clients, school academic reports for parents and so on.

How to use DocumentBurster to publish reports on the web

DocumentBurster can publish reports to your portal in a couple of ways. Based on what your portal vendor supports (and on your requirements), you can choose any of the following methods:

  • Use DocumentBurster to generate and copy the reports in a document storage location which your portal will recognize for publishing reports
  • Publish reports by sending those reports as attachments to some special portal enabled email addresses
  • HTTP/WebDAV upload

1. Place the burst reports in a special document storage location (folder) which the portal will recognize for publishing reports

Being the simplest report publishing method, this is the first thing to check if your portal supports. Check your portal’s documentation and see if you can publish reports by placing the documents on a specific folder which the portal will recognize (and will have it configured).

Following is how one of the users published reports to portal using this method. This should give you a good idea on how to implement a similar solution.

“Using DocumentBurster, this weekly report can be split by student ID, and then put in a document storage location where students can view their individual report via the web”

2. Publish reports by sending those reports as attachments to some special portal enabled email addresses

This is a feature which most of the big portal vendors will support. Check your portal’s documentation to see to which email addresses you can publish reports.

Appendix B. SharePoint Report Delivery chapter from DocumentBurster User Guide document contains more details about how to upload reports to a Microsoft SharePoint portal using this method.

3. HTTP/WebDAV Upload

This method is more tricky to implement and you should use it only in case your portal doesn’t support any of the previous two ways to publish reports (or you have another strong reason to use HTTP/WebDAV upload).

Most of the big portal vendors including Microsoft SharePoint, IBM WebSphere Portal and others will support WebDAV (standard) protocol to publish reports online.

In order to upload reports using WebDAV protocol you should:

  • Check your portal’s documentation and see how to enable WebDAV upload
  • Check any of the following existing DocumentBurster sample scripts scripts/burst/samples/ant_vfs.groovy or scripts/burst/samples/curl_*.groovy

Any of the above sample scripts can be used to upload reports using the WebDAV protocol. Commons VFS – Supported File Systems, cURL and DocumentBurster – Advanced report delivery scenarios are resources which might help you when implementing WebDAV upload using any of above sample scripts.

As you can see DocumentBurster software offers multiple options to publish reports online in order to support most, if not all, of the existing portal vendors.

Feel free to download DocumentBurster and see for yourself how this software can help your company to publish business reports online and to implement the most demanding report delivery requirements.