Hi John,
I have read through all the posts in this thread and I'd like to comment on your request for information. My company, InSync Technologies LLC, focuses on a complete set of BI Views and software for JD Edwards; however, I am not replying to sell you any of it, I am rather replying to your request for information about SSRS as a reporting platform. As we have based many of our solutions on SSRS, SSIS and SSAS plus a few third party packages, we have extensive knowledge of SSRS as an enterprise reporting tool.
I understand your frustration with many of the third party companies, and the ODA views which are limited and can be frustrating when users ask for information outside of the prepackaged views. If you take a little time you could create a Data Warehouse utilizing an OLE connection to SQL Server and through the ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) process you can transform the various fields that require special handling, ie: julian date fields, decimals places, and some of the weird leading spaces. Also creating a few new tables that extract category code values and order types, etc.. will result in a database that will be easy to use by either developers or power users and then they can access and build their own reports using your new warehouse files.
The process isn't difficult, it just takes a bit of time mapping out the ETL Warehouses, but once accomplished you can keep them updated with SSIS (at whatever interval you like scheduling the jobs in SQL Server Agent) in a separate database and even on a separate server if you have one available. None of this takes any really unique skills if you understand the basic data structures in JDE.
"jdeora" points out that you might want to also consider using SSAS (Analysis Services) to build OLAP Cubes and source these in your reports. Again, we offer a wide array of prebuilt Cubes for the larger files in JDE which are usually files like the F0911, F4111, the F42119, etc.. and trying to access these files may cause performance issues with any reporting tools unless you build a set of predefined indexes on the data warehouse, which is possible but SSAS is usually a much better alternative.
With all this stated SSRS is a wonderful platform in its ease of use and ability to distribute reports to a wide number of users across an Intranet or even via the Internet with no additional licenses or costs involved. We utilize SSRS as one of our standard bases of deployment, along with the other Microsoft Tools available in SQL Server.
You should be able to satisfy any of your reporting needs by following a path similar to those I have listed and if you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them as best I can.
If you are looking for a low cost solution already built you can take a look at our offering, but it sounds like you are trying to conserve costs which is understandable in this market.
sincerely,
Paul Lynch
InSync Technologies LLC
http://www.bi4jde.com
http://www.insynctec.com