custom reports and reporting in general are getting better and better but cannot face all the needs of the users. I understand perfectly that you are reluctant to give access to the whole database since it’s your intellectual property and it’s right to preserve it.
How about an intermediate solution to give access to all the reports, even the custom ones, through ODBC or something similar in order to facilitate the automatic reclassification of data and do some business intelligence without the possibility to look inside your great software?
This is not the reason at all. The issue is technical. There is no easy way to do this currently (there is no switch I can just turn on) but I’m making progress towards that goal.
We actually did a very similar thing about 20 years ago on a system running Advanced Pick which was a multi value DB and had to be ‘flattened’ in a nightly export to a directory of tab delimited files - it’s pretty old school, but it worked well for us.