White Paper: Custom Reporting And Standard Reports

Zeacom Library offers reporting through three-tier, client-server architecture. The three layers consist of the user interface, the application logic (business rules), and data storage (respectively referred to as client tier, application tier and data tier). Boundaries between tiers are logical only; it is possible to run all tiers on the same physical machine, or run each tier on a separate machine, depending on load and other physical factors.

Client Tier
The client tier is responsible for the presentation of data as a report. Examples of the client tier are the standard Reports application for Zeacom Communications Center, and third-party report writer applications, such as Microsoft Reporting Services, Crystal, Brio, and Cognos.

Application Tier
The application tier implements the business rules of data transformation. The client tier receives the transformed information from the application tier and formats it as reports. In other words, the client tier receives the results of data manipulation. The built-in application tier for Zeacom Communications Center is the Reports Engine that runs on the server computer. In the case of third-party reporting software such as Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, the reporting software operates as both the client and application layers. To create reports using third-party software, a dictionary of available information is needed. Zeacom provides a database dictionary for the Custom Reporting database that allows report queries to be constructed.

Data Tier
The data tier is responsible for storage of raw information generated from the contact center operation. The data server provides an interface to the application server. With Custom Reporting, this interface adheres to Open Database Connectivity (ODBC). OCBC architecture provides flexible scalability because the application tier can connect to different databases, and a single database can serve data to multiple applications.