I often have to post to the friendly people of connect when I need help creating a report. I'm not a SQL expert or even novice, nor do I have time to become one and learn all tables that Altiris/Symantec CMS uses. Managing PCs with CMS is a small part of my job. I've been using altiris for 16+ years, and CMS 8.x since it was released and I've never successfully been able to create a report from scratch. Thank god for people on connect when I need them.
Is it on the roadmap to improve how reports and filters are created?
With other products I use, creating reports and filters is all done through the web GUI and the product creates the SQL hidden on the back end to the user. I can see value of having advanced mode for those fluent in SQL, obviously, but what about something for the average customer?
As an example, I recently asked support for help creating a filter with free disk space <1 GB. Even level one support (who was very friendly) couldn't help me, it had to go to backline. This seems bananas to me. There should be a GUI way to do this that support doesn't need to be involved that looks something like
Create new filter, enter filter name
Select criteria (drop down perhaps). Criteria will be the fields that can be searched on in common names, such as free disk space or total disk space or user name or computer name, etc etc etc (not confusing table/field names, please).
Admin then selects operator depending on the criteria chosen (is, is like, is greater than, is less than etc etc etc)
Admin then enters in value to search on. Admin can enter multiple criteria such as "computer name like X" AND "disk space < 1GB" (with option to use "and" or "or" between criteria).
Admin clicks save and then altiris builds SQL on back end and ta dah you have a filter.
Same workflow above would work for reports as well. I realize there is sort of a way to build reports now using the GUI, but it's not intuitive at all, especially if you don't know the names of tables or where things are stored. Honestly even knowing tables the GUI for building reports is not easy to use.
Welcome any discussion or ideas people have on this. I think as software portal moves to being more time critical, this is the next area that Symantec really could improve to help the administrators that use it. I'd find this much more valuable than the workspaces that came with 8.5.