Visao Reporting is scheduled for release in early February of 2011 and although we haven’t been able to get our hands on it just yet we wanted to provide a premature assessment. The first thing that we noticed was while other vendors are trying to copy what SugarCRM has already done with Professional reporting, Visao Reporting is adding features that no other native solution has supplied.

By far the most intriguing feature is the ability to create any type of report and place it in any view. With Visao Reporting a user can create a report and choose which modules will display the report and in which views. This feature alone will save business thousands in SugarCRM customization costs as this is a fairly common request.

The major pitfall of most CE reporting systems that I have seen is that they are very technically oriented. Visao Reporting is still a very technically oriented reporting system due to the fact that the user has to create SQL to generate a report. The difference with Visao Reporting is that due to the breadth of features it will not just be used as reporting for CE but also and addon for SugarCRM Pro. The combination of Visao Reporting and SugarCRM Pro Reporting will enable SugarCRM driven business to create any report, in any section of Sugar and with any level of complexity easier than ever before.

My prediction is that technical users, administrators and report writers will soon turn to Visao Reporting when they need custom reports that other solutions can’t provide or when they need to see the data in any module view of SugarCRM.