PAWS provides numerous standard reporting options designed for end-users, including reports created through the PAWS Report Designer, several standard reports included out-of-the-box and some example report templates in MS Word or Excel.

For certain reporting needs, none of the standard reporting options are sufficient; this typically leads to Pentana developing custom reports on a consulting basis. A common example of this is the 'Final Audit Report' document, which is typically unique to each organization and best created as a custom automated MS Word report.

If only a small number of such reports are required, it is generally most cost-effective for Pentana to deliver reports on a consulting basis as a Customization Service (see above). However, where customers wish to develop or modify their own custom reports under PAWS v8 (and they have the technical capability to do so) then Pentana can now offer a technical training program for Report Developers.

The Report Developer Training Program covers both the business analysis functions (e.g. understanding the PAWS schema, preparing report specifications) and the technical developer perspective (e.g. coding the reports in MS Word and MS Excel). To be effective, report developers will need:

• A good knowledge of the PAWS data model, as it relates to report development
• To understand how PAWS is configured within their implementation
• To manage the report development life-cycle in accordance with good practice, from requirements specification through to development, QA and deployment
• For development tasks, a solid technical grasp of SQL concepts and of the report development techniques available.
  
  

The Pentana training program is divided into a series of sessions as follows:

1. Understanding the PAWS database schema
2. Preparing specifications for custom report development
3. Choosing the optimum reporting strategy
4. Getting started with the PAWS v8 report automation model
5. Automating in MS Word
6. Automating in MS Excel
7. Other considerations (e.g. custom fields, Retain integration)