I am not endorsing any one product here. I am simply outlining some of the options that we have implemented for clients over the years. I will however state that Sage considers the Sage MAS Intelligence tool to be their official stated replacement for FRx. You can find more information at http://go.sageerpsolutions.com/forms/100Intelligence.
As you are aware, there is a lot of reporting tools on the market and Sage uses its share of them as well. We have customers who have used the following: FRx, F9, BizNet, Crystal Reports, KnowledgeSync, Excel, SQL Reporting Services and now the latest MAS Intelligence. They each have their own unique qualities.
The good news is that one of them is off the market. That is FRx. The bad news is that the Microsoft pulled the plug on it to add another tool. This is known as PowerPivot. It is available as a free download from Microsoft. This tool is in addition to the SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). The PowerPivot comes in several varieties including an Excel plug-in, SQL Server PowerPivot and PowerPivot for Sharepoint. This will be different in SQL Server 2012. This is only available for Excel 2010 or later and SQL Server 2008 R2. These tools come with no predefined reports to use out of the box for Sage 500 ERP though. So you will build everything from scratch.
Let me start with KnowledgeSync. While this has report like qualities I tend to think of this more as alerting and in a very unofficial way workflow enabler. It does not do anything per se in the workflow but it allows you perform notification alerts based on rules that you define within your ERP System. Can it be used as a reporting tool? Well yes it can, I suppose. You can attach various formatted reports to your email alerts including text, HTML, CSV, XML, PDF, Crystal Reports, etc.
F9 is an Excel based financial reporting only tool that comes with a variety of predefined reports. So this is for GL only for Sage 500 ERP.
BizNet is an Excel based reporting tool that comes with a plethora of predefined reports. This supports all modules of Sage 500 ERP. This is based on the SSRS model.
Crystal Reports in the Sage 500 ERP space can be used in various ways some of which may require some additional VB coding to keep with the traditional delivered model.
Sage MAS Intelligence is an Excel based reporting tool that comes with a plethora of predefined reports. This is a Sage owned tool. This supports all modules of Sage 500 ERP. It has a lot of moving parts but continues to be streamlined. I blogged about it a while back, http://rklesolutions.com/blogs/joenoll/sage-mas-intelligence-also-referred-to-as-sage-mi-or-smi/.
Sage 500 ERP also has the BI components that may be accessed from the Business Desktop or the Business Dashboard. These are comprised of SQL Views which are constructed data views based on guidelines provided by Sage. Then you use various Sage 500 ERP tools found on the Business Desktop to add these views to the menu system. I will be doing a session on this at Sage Summit 2012. The session is C-0373 Sage 500 ERP: The Power of the Cube—Getting the Most out of Business Insights Views, Thursday, August 16th at 2 pm. I blogged about this http://rklesolutions.com/blogs/joenoll/create-a-sage-erp-mas-500-user-permissions-view/ and have a whitepaper http://www.rklesolutions.com/_downloads/Adding_Custom_Views_to_MAS_500_BI.pdf.
