Details:
Reports, creating them, running them, distributing them - are the bane of every developers, users, and administrators existance. But people LOVE their reports. Many commercial solutions exist to try and ease the agony of report creation and management; most famously (or notoriously) is "Crystal Reports". Open Reports is the Open Source answer to reporting. Using the renowned Jasper reports format and libraries Open Reports provides a power report server that runs reports on the server side, while letting you develop reports in a client-side GUI assemble-it manner. And not just any reports, but beautiful and colorful reports. Output can be delivered right to a user's browser window as PDF, to their desktop as XLS, or as plain old CSV - all from the same report. Access to reports can be restricted (on the server!) to certain users and groups - and just for kicks a powerful schedular is built in too.
Adam Williams is a network administrator in Grand Rapids, but the network he deals with is all over Michigan, with a couple of hundred workstations, running Linux and other Operating Systems. Adam has been a regular contributor to the KLUG technical discussions and mailing list, both presenting and solving some of the most challenging networking and configuration problems. You can read more about Adam at his website or his technological doings as Whitemice Consulting.