SAP Crystal Report 2008

Crystal Reports 2008 is a powerful, dynamic, actionable reporting solution that helps you design, explore, visualize, and deliver business reports via the Web or embedded in enterprise applications. It enables end users to consume reports with stunning visualizations, conduct on-report business modeling, and execute decisions instantly.

Crystal Reports provides you with:

Powerful report designer. Report authors benefit from a complete set of layout and design controls to create highly formatted, interactive, and professional-looking reports. Use the standalone designer or the design tool integrated within Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, 2005, or 2003 without leaving the development environment.

Flexible application development. Developers can easily leverage the full support for .NET. Crystal Reports generates HTML directly, allowing developers to focus on application business logic rather than tedious, time-intensive hand coding. Separating the application development and report design tasks allows your developers to focus on application development, while report authors can focus exclusively on report design.

Report management and delivery. Reports are previewed in HTML and published to the Web for easy and controlled sharing – allowing for better business decisions at all levels of the organization. Reports can also be exported and repurposed in the most popular formats, such as PDF, Excel, and RTF. Your IT group can centralize the management of operational reporting while distributing the report authoring function to the lines of business.

INTERACT: Empower Your End Users to Explore Reports Interactively

• Xcelsius integration. Import Xcelsius�-generated SWF files into your report and benefit from improved design-time integration and stunning visualizations.

• Adobe Flex integration. Integrate your reports with operational workflows by embedding Adobe Flex (SWF) applications into your reports. Using Adobe Flex Builder, you can create any business-user user interface to access report data and integrate with external Web services.

• Parameter panel. The report designer and the .NET Winform and .NET Webform viewers have a parameter panel so that parameter values can be set without refreshing data.

• Interactive report viewing. On-report sorting, filtering, and report reformatting with the .NET Winform and NET Webform viewers allows users to explore information interactively without re-querying the database. New optional parameters provide for complex, user-driven filtering scenarios. Users can answer more business questions with fewer, more flexible reports.

VISUALIZE: Create Compelling Reports with Stunning Visualizations

• Adobe Flash integration: A wide variety of flexible data presentation options are now available through Flash. Flash (SWF) files can be integrated into your report and report data can be shared with SWF via FlashVars for compelling, interactive, and information-rich reports.

• Powerful cross-tabs: Summary, variance, and any other customer calculations can be inserted into a cross-tab row or a column – especially useful for reports that benefit from a table structure such as financial reports. T

• Flexible pagination: Report designers can customize page size and easily control page breaking after N records/groups. A single report can combine portrait and landscaped pages, and the white space at the end of groups can be removed by compressing page footers.

DESIGN: Develop Powerful Data Mashups

• Integration with Xcelsius, Adobe Flex, and Adobe Flash. Developers now have the ability to produce powerful mashups (that is, hybrid Web applications), pulling data from various sources. They can easily integrate components designed in Flash and Flex without any coding.

• Web services data driver. The new data driver offers additional Web access to Web services by providing support for RPC encoding of SOAP messages, SSL-secured Web servers, as well as a working compatibility with the WS-Security standards. It adapts to custom logon requirements such as email addresses or user/password.

DESIGN: Save Valuable Report Design Time

• Built-in barcode support. Generate barcodes with only a few clicks of the mouse by using the new “turn to barcode” function in the context menu.

• Enhanced designer features. Report designer will be more productive with features like global formula search, duplicate formula, duplicate running total, auto complete field names, and the Find in Field Explorer feature.

• Single edition. This single offering provides customers with quick access to the features they need to meet any application and user requirement. Report samples and developer documentation are now a free, optional download.

• Multilingual reporting. Choose the working language you prefer by simply selecting the language packs you wish to use during product installation. Then switch the report designer user interface to use any of the installed language packs.

• Reduced install footprint. The download size has been reduced to 250MB to provide fast access via the download site. The runtime files included in developer applications are also significantly smaller.

DEPLOY: Enjoy Comprehensive Deployment Options

• Save reports directly to crystalreports.com. Expand your deployment options with on-demand reporting capabilities when you open and save reports directly to crystalreports.com, allows you to manage and share your reports securely without dependency on IT.

• Integrated salesforce.com driver. The salesforce.com driver included with Crystal Reports 2008 allows for easy access to complete customer data – turning it into actionable business information.

• Improved XML exporting. Render reports in almost any format and enjoy faster and easier integration with your industry-specific business processes – without any custom coding.

• Crystal Reports .NET report modification software development kit (SDK). The Crystal report application server (RAS) SDK is now available for users of Crystal Reports .NET API without the use of a RAS server.