Auditor Help: Publishing Reports on an Intranet

There are a variety of ways to accomplish sharing the Ecora reports via an Intranet. Since the reports are in HTML format, publishing them consists of getting the report(s) to a location where your webserver can access them and maintaining an index or table of contents for the published reports. This (likely) requires the cooperation of your webmaster, since access rights are involved.

To publish Ecora reports:

First, location - getting the reports where they can be published.
There are two main options, moving the reports to the webserver and/or setting the software to save to the webserver by default.
The advantage to changing the default save location is that the process requires no intervention and reports are automatically available - the disadvantage being that ALL reports are indiscriminately available unless you choose a control procedure through the indexing (covered below).

To change the default save location:

  1. Run the Ecora software.
  2. Click on the File... Settings menu.
  3. Click on the Preferences tab.
  4. Under the Default Storage Directory, use the Browse... button to locate or manually enter the path to the webserver directory designated for Ecora reports.
  5. Verify the remaining settings on the tab.
  6. Click OK to close the dialog box. All future reports will be saved to this location.

To move existing reports:

  1. Locate the Ecora directory (by default C:/Program Files/Ecora/Ecora for <ProductName>/<ProductName>).
  2. Locate the /Views subdirectory.
  3. Locate the report directory (by default, named for the date) you wish to move.
  4. Use a compression utility, such as WinZip, to archive the report, preserving the subdirectory structure.
    Helpful Hint Tip: In WinZip, use the Include Subfolders and Save Full Path Info options.
  5. Copy or move the compressed archive file (*.zip) to the webserver directory.
  6. Extract the archive.
  7. Verify that the subdirectory structure matches the original.

Second, indexing - letting users browse the reports.
Again, there are two main options; this time, manual and automatic.
Once the files are in place, the user needs an easy way to browse the reports. The most obvious solution is to link from an existing intranet web page to a new table of contents for reports. The webmaster (or anyone with access to the page) would then manually create and maintain a list of the available reports, linking to the index-short.html (or index-long.html) for each. A more automated solution would be to write a script that builds a table of contents dynamically based on the directories present. Indexing manually provides the ability to select which reports are browsable. You may, for example, report nightly for disaster recovery reasons, but only choose to publish weekly or monthly for auditor or other audiences.

Note Note: The default naming conventions and file structure are slightly different in Serial Mode for versions 2.3 and higher. Adjust the instructions above accordingly.