[warrenm]

fwiw ... you might be "successful" doing what you're proposing (if you choose a tiny feature set, and discard everything else everyone asks you for)

...but the reason "out-of-the-box solutions" exist is because other folks have already spent the millions of developer hours, user feedback, etc to get it working :)

Several years ago I worked for a company (filled with seasoned, smart, great devs) that tried to in-house their own reporting tool

They quit and migrated to Crystal Reports because integrating an existing tool was worlds cheaper/faster than trying to do it all themselves

Later they migrated to BIRT because of CR limitations

And did another migration a couple years after that (I forget now to what tool)

The only drawback from a end-user perspective of those migrations were that reports couldn't be automigrated between reporting platforms

[tagspace]

Thanks @warrenm. That makes a lot of sense. The problem is that that feels like we'll have to throw away the "looks like a nicely integrated part of our platform' requirement.

[warrenm]

It may be worth investing your time in skinning/theming whatever reporting/search tool you decide to use :)