Crystal Reports 2008 is a powerful, dynamic, actionable reporting solution that helps you design, explore, visualize, and deliver 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 from the report itself - reducing dependency on IT and developers.

FEATURES:

Crystal Reports 2008 provides advanced functionality to help reduce report proliferation and maintenance - increasing visualization exibility and saving time with highly productive design features.

• Xcelsius Integration - Import Xcelsius-generated SWF files into your report and benefit from improved design-time integration and stunning visualizations. Enhance your reports with what-if scenario models that enable users to make important decisions dynamically, without leaving the report file.
• 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 UI to access report data and integrate with external web services. Data in your report can be passed to the Flex application via Flashvars, making it easy to create a flexible UI even when you don't have access to your data via web services. The Flex applications can do tasks like database write-back - invoking operational workflows directly within Crystal Reports.
• 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. Parameters used are displayed on the panel so that report consumers can easily see them, make changes, and have the new values applied directly to the saved 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 - significantly reducing Developer and IT support dependency.

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. The SWF files can be embedded in the report or linked via a website.
• Powerful Crosstabs - Add business-critical information to your reports without coding. Summary, variance, and any other customer calculations can be inserted into a crosstab row or a column - especially useful for reports that benefit from a table structure such as financial reports. The crosstab table structure makes reports much faster to build and maintain. This feature also provides powerful benefits to crosstab-based charts since custom formulas in the crosstab can be visualized within the charts.
• Flexible Pagination - Facilitate better online report viewing to your end users. Report designers can customize page size and easily control page breaking after N records/groups. A single report can combine portrait and landscape oriented pages and the white space at the end of groups can be removed by compressing the page footers. Online report consumption is improved because reports are easier to read.

DESIGN - Develop powerful data mashups

• Integration with Xcelsius, Adobe Flex, and Adobe Flash - Developers now have the ability to produce powerful mashups pulling data from various sources. They can easily integrate components designed in Flash and Flex without any coding, and significantly expand the scope of their application deployment.
• Web services data driver - Integrating with various web services is difficult and complex due to a variety of implementation types. 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. Developers combine the flexibility of XML and Web Services with report formatting and visualization to deliver reports that link report data to sophisticated interactive data mashups such as integration with third party mapping systems.