In the business climate today, cutting costs and increasing profitability is critical. Organizations create and distribute reports for evaluating and taking action when management defined conditions are not met. The evaluation can largely be automated using Alert reporting.

Alert reporting automates the evaluation of a defined condition to determine whether a report should be distributed. Individuals who the report is distributed to know before they open it that they are receiving this report because there is an exception in their area of responsibility.

A data driven alert is an event that is prompted by a guideline you define. This guideline can vary from simple to complex. For example, a simple guideline might be to alert a sales manager when an order is entered that exceeds $1 million. An example of a more complex guideline might be to alert a department head when cumulative expenses exceed budget for any category. The report sent to the manager as a result of the alert could show the most recent transactions, the amounts, and the sources.

Alert reporting is an integrated feature of WebFOCUS Managed Reporting and ReportCaster. An Alert report is a type of Standard Report within Managed Reporting that can be distributed by ReportCaster. In addition, ReportCaster burst capability can send targeted information to the people who need it, so there is less information for each person to analyze.

ReportCaster Alerts work with all E-mail clients, including the following mobile devices: Palm OS, Pocket PC, Blackberry, and e-mail-enabled mobile phones. Alerts can also be sent to any PC or laptop computer with E-mail capability.

ReportCaster Alerts provide the following:

• Alert Wizard. Enables you to quickly set up test conditions (rules) that determines if an alert should be launched (called the alert test procedure). It also enables the administrator or developer to create the report for distribution (called the alert event procedure) and select distribution options.
• Two-Way Email support. Offers the ability to attach a Two-Way Email template to a ReportCaster Alert.

  Two-Way Email users can respond to a data-driven alert and perform further actions. For example, they can request more information about a topic, distribute reports to employees, or update a data source. Essentially, an alert response exposes users to all the functions that are offered by WebFOCUS.

• Scheduling flexibility. When scheduling a ReportCaster Alert, users can choose to run the alert, as often as every minute, to check for desired test conditions.