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Our solution, implemented over 5 years ago, was to convert reports to
.PCL files (now PDFs) and copy them to a directory in the IFS that gets
auto-created for each user if it doesn't exist.  The filename is
embedded with the date & timestamp to ensure uniqueness.  A web page
uses net.data and a CL to read the IFS directory and present the reports
to the users.  With several buttons for each report they can 'print' or
'download' and can also 'copy' the reports to another user or 'delete'
from their list.  We also provide the raw spool file copied to an IFS
object for importing into Excel ('text' button).

The main maintenance item is cleaning up reports that the users fail to
delete themselves; we've a daily CL that purges reports older than x
days.  Once a month or so I manually purge user directories that haven't
been used in 3 months.  It only takes about a minute so I've not been
too concerned with automating the process.

The spool files themselves aren't kept for more than a couple of days;
once the report's converted to IFS files the spools aren't necessary.

With 1200 users and thousands of reports generated daily, it's worked
pretty well.  Support issues are now next to nil, although there were
some growing pains along the way.

I've considered migrating to an email-based approach as an alternative
but that would involve directory syncing between the 400 and the
corporate LDAP, which currently doesn't know about 400 users.


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