I have report binders to deliver cost center financials to their managers monthly, however managers responsible for more than one cost center get one big PDF rather than a PDF for each cost center. I have not found an option to deliver them separately. Does this option exist?
Thank you!
I’m not aware of such an option. Even if you include multiple reports into the same binder they will be compressed into a single document to be emailed. This makes sense because there are limitations on attachment file size and number depending on your organization’s business rules, so you want to keep the size and number of attachments to a minimum.
All that said, you could accomplish this with multiple report binders and emails. Or you could work with your IT department to get PDF bursting software installed on local workstations such as PDFtk. That would allow your managers to receive 1 large PDF, then use the software on their workstation to split it into individual pages.
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Thank you, I was thinking that was probably the answer (multiple binders). Since that would also mean multiple templates, one for each cost center, I was hoping there was another trick.
Katie, here’s how I accomplish what you’re looking for. It works but is heavy in administration.
- Have your IT department setup a mailbox or distribution list for each object you need separated. For me it’s a distribution list for each construction job, since my issue is distributing report binders by job. The members of the distribution list are the recipients of the report for that job.
- Setup each of these mailboxes as a user in prophix, but don’t assign a license to them. It’s what I call a “ghost user”.
- Configure security for these ghost users such that they have read only rights to your cube, generally all members for all dimensions except for the dimension you need individual reports for. For this dimension, you must make each ghost user able to view only the object you want included in the report.
- Now setup your report binder to send to these ghost users rather than the direct users.
It works but there’s a lot of ongoing admin required every time we setup a new job or the team rosters change.
Now that we’ve started using Microsoft teams for our jobs, I plan to use the team email address instead of a distribution list, which will ease the administration by quite a bit.
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Bob, this is an interesting suggestion. Thank you! I will see what I can do with the ghost users. I tried setting up an employee as a ghost so that reports could be sent to them (they didnt need any other access) and it failed since there was no license assigned. I may have gotten the setup wrong.
Hmmm, I don’t have that issue. Let me check again to be sure that a recent release didn’t “plug a hole” that I was taking advantage of. I’ll test and reply back to let you know what I find.
Katie, I just confirmed that this configuration still works as expected. Let me run through some screenshots to make it more clear, in case I mis-stated something in my earlier post.
When I ran the above steps, the Teams Site received a copy of the binder with only the data for Job 705, as expected. But they won’t be able to view them in Prophix; that does require a license. This only works for report binder distribution.
Thank you for the screenshots, very helpful! I will test on a group email and see if I can get this working.
That worked! I must have got the access wrong last time I tried. Thank you Bob!
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