Reporting Software Business Intelligence Document Generation Software

I'm jazzed about – of all things – reporting software. (And yeah, friends say I need to get out of the basement more.) Because at my last company, we used the "market leader" in reporting and business intelligence. It sucked. It was tedious (individually formatted fields?! c'mon) and I kept getting interrupted by coworkers with question after question after question.

Big thanks to Santosh, my new boss who gave me the power to try out and ultimately choose reporting and document generation software for our company. There are a few things I'm looking for. It has to be able to work with XML reports AND SQL reports. Our data is everywhere, but mainly SQL databases and XML files. We're not about to waste time transferring everything into one data storage format although we try to avoid Excel data and reports.

Our company has a lot of different programmers, so it also has to handle Java reports, .net reports, C# reports, visual basic reports, and C++ reports. And it would be great if it could create Python reports, PHP reports and Ruby reports. (Not to sound too greedy, but that's my wish list. We have a cool new programmer who keeps bugging me about ruby on rails reports. Let me find something so I can dump a bunch of this work on someone else.)

I'm in the middle of demoing Windward Reports and so far it's WAY better than what I was used to. They talk about their reporting software and business intelligence and say they can be used for java reports, dotnet reports and csharp reports. In our initial testing it has handled everything we've thrown at it.

It's fast and strong. It didn't take long to design my first report. (Actually, I asked one of the HR people to design a template – she designed it in about 20 minutes. I just had to tweak the data tags.) And it looks like they're about to launch software that is programming language agnostic. But we haven't explored everything Windward is supposed to be able to do. And don't get me started on Excel reports...

Any experience with Windward's reporting software or business intelligence stuff? Let me know – especially if you think it sucks as much as the "rhymes with pistol" software. I don't want the headaches all over again.