Old friends can help with new challenges to homesteading. Minisoft's ODBC software stepped in again to get a 3000 customer away from the pricing schemes of Powerhouse and its Quiz reporting software. That ODBC link between MPE/iX and Windows databases and tools turned out to be the essential component in pulling a client away from Powerhouse, according to the Support Group's Sue Kiezel.

Kiezel said her support client got an eye-popping quote to move Quiz from a 9x9 to an A-500 server: $27,000. Like some sites who are learning about the new regime of pricing from Unicom, this Support Group customer was returning to Quiz support after years of no improvements to the former Cognos product. Quiz made its way onto many MANMAN installations in the during the 1980s on the ERP suite. Getting out from under that legacy required a reasonable tool to connect the data with more modern reporting.

Enter the Minisoft ODBC software. The middleware connected with SQL Server to build a reporting database, data that was used to create the Excel spreadsheets everyone wants to use. As we've seen before, Windows-based reporting solutions like Crystal Reports can carry the 3000's data into departments better than Quiz did.

"SQL Server has turned into a beautiful database," Kiezel says. "You don't need a database administrator for it. Because of this kind of connection, my users no longer need paper for their reports. The middleware opens it up for MANMAN uses, and Excel can make joined tables for reports. Instead of just sending out a paper report, I'm sending out a spreadsheet, with the first three sheets of them working like a visual dashboard."

Visual Basic does analytics in this kind of report solution, too. "We are now in the modern world," Kiezel says. The bonus? Finding an expert to tune up these reports is a $50-75 hourly charge, instead of the $200 hourly that a Powerhouse consultant will charge to beautify and enhance Quiz. There are features and solutions that are worth the extra cost you'll sometimes encounter in MPE/iX. But reporting doesn't turn out to be worth the extra expense in licenses and expertise — not when there's middleware to open up reporting options.