The IBM Engineering team has been modernizing the Report Builder (RB) user interface. We want to share our progress to date and get your feedback. Jazz Reporting Service (JRS) 7.0.3 M30 provides a new user experience for listing reports and folders, exporting reports and scheduling exports, and RB administration. RB beta allows you to try the modernized RB in your test environment. RB beta can be enabled by an administrator and then each user also has the ability to turn RB beta on or off.

Let me cover a few important details about what you should expect in the RB beta.

1. The reports and folders listing page has a new visual style, includes new capabilities, and reports are exclusively organized by folders.
   
   a. Organizing reports by folders is a major shift compared to the existing RB; tags were the primary organization mechanisms in the past. You will need to work with your users to prepare for this transformation. For example, the IBM ELM jazz.net environment had a large number of folders, over 150, and reports, over 6000, at the root level. The reason for this was that the old RB UI primarily organized reports by tags. The recommendation, for the RB beta, is to minimize the number of folders and reports at the root level. Besides system-generated folders, the ELM team has implemented two different types of folders for its jazz.net implementation, one for users and another for projects. In the user folder, you would create or move existing user-specific folders, and in the project folder, you would move anything else that is organized on a project level. This will keep the folder root level clean and responsive. This is a great opportunity to clean up the clutter created over the years. Moving reports to a different folder structure does not affect reports, which are part of existing dashboards.
   
   
   
   b. The reports and folders listing display additional information for each report, such as when a report or folder was last modified. There are even more columns you can select to display, such as ID, Last modified by, Last run, and Last run by. These columns provide insight to help you understand a report’s usage patterns. For a complete list of additional report listing columns, click on the Manage column icon and select the columns you prefer and in what order you want them to display. You can also sort and resize the columns to meet your needs. The My reports and All reports views can be uniquely customized based on your column selections. This allows you to have specific information that you would like to view under My reports and different information under All reports.
   
   
   
   c. The reports listing page makes it easy to make simple changes or perform common tasks without having to open a report. For example, you can directly edit the name and description of reports and folders. You can also export a report or schedule to export a report directly from the reports listing.
   
   
2. The feature of exporting and scheduling an export are streamlined into one improved UI that lets you export immediately directly from the reports listing, or helps you move through the steps to schedule the export on a recurring basis.
   Beta note: For reports that require you to select a configuration or filters to run, you will need to open the report to perform that export. The ability to select configuration and filters before exporting will be available in subsequent milestones.
   
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3. Previously RB administration had three columns and a design quite a bit different than other ELM applications. It provided little flexibility for the RB administrators. We made a number of improvements in this area.
   
   a. The RB administrator can access the RB admin page now, from …/rs/admin, to make it aligned with the rest of the ELM applications.
   
   b. RB administration is organized into different sections you are already familiar with, such as report managers, data sources, and importing reports. The administration UI also has some new sections such as RB themes, and beta features.
   
   

This was a short overview of the new RB user experience progress. Additional information can be found in the JRS documentation by filtering the keyword beta. We encourage you to try the new RB beta and hope that you will enjoy what you see. We recommend that you download JRS 7.0.3 M30 and install it in your test environment. However, if you are eager to try it out, you can use our self-host environment, which is already running RB beta, to see the non-admin changes at https://jazz.net/rs/web or using Jazz sandbox (https://jazz.net/sandbox02/).

We are looking for your candid feedback on how to further improve RB to make it more usable and accessible to you and your entire organization by clicking the Share feedback link directly or under the Beta icon and then under Report Builder new user experience. We are not perfect and even with the best intentions and practices, defects can still occur. If you do find a defect, you can submit them using here. Make sure to set ‘How found’ to ‘RB beta’ to allow you defect creation.

We are not stopping with the Report Builder modernization here. Future JRS 7.0.3 milestones will contain additional improvements/features and we encourage you to check out JRS download pages for the latest milestones new and noteworthy.

Fariz Saracevic
IBM Engineering Reporting (JRS, PUB, ENI) Product Management