Crystal Reports 2008 Visual Advantage [Crystal Reports 2008 + Crystal Xcelsius Engage]

Traditionally, business reports have been associated with mind-numbing rows of data and static charts. With Crystal Reports 2008 Visual Advantage, all that has changed.

Crystal Reports 2008 Visual Advantage is the first and only combined report design-and-visualization solution that provides a clear view of your business through highly formatted reports and interactive dashboards and charts. It combines stunning visualization from Xcelsius Engageand and best-in-class reporting capabilities from Crystal Reports 2008 into one integrated solution - so you can take the best action to keep your business on a profitable course.

With Crystal Reports Visual Advantage, you can access any company data and combine it in highly visual, interactive reports or dashboards - leveraging the power of what-if scenario analysis to give decision-makers a clear picture of today's business performance, and better insight into tomorrow.
Crystal Reports Visual Advantage provides you with everything you need to deliver actionable business data in any shape or form - whether it is a dashboard, an operational report, or even a desktop widget, you can create it with point-and-click ease.

Why Crystal Reports 2008 Visual Advantage ?

• Design feature-rich reports and easily embed them in developer applications
• Empower your users to make better decisions with on-report what-if analysis
• Present your data like never before with stunning report visualizations
• Minimize your IT and developer effort with interactive reports
• Save design time by embedding Xcelsius models in reports without coding

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.

CRYSTAL REPORTS 2008: WHAT'S NEW

You've never seen a report do this before!
Crystal Reports 2008 builds on 15 years and 12 versions. It's the reporting tool of choice for millions of IT professionals, application developers, and report consumers.

The following is an overview of the key benefits provided by Crystal Reports 2008:

• Empower end users to explore reports interactively
• Create compelling reports with stunning visualizations
• Develop powerful data mashups
• Save valuable report design time
• Enjoy comprehensive report deployment options and an improved report designer

• Provide more information with one report and reduce report proliferation
• Win in the market place with high-impact report presentations
• Quickly embed Xcelsius, Flash and Flex applications in Crystal Reports without coding
• Reduce development time and increase designer productivity - Enable users to explore more information interactively - online and on their desktop

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.

Crystal Xcelsius Engage 2008 is the perfect way to get started in the exciting area of dashboarding. It lets you create business dashboards and data presentations from spreadsheets, corporate databases -- and share them "live" via Crystal Reports 2008, Microsoft Office, Adobe PDF and the Web. It provides end-users with access to up-to-minute company data in a simple and actionable interface.

WHY XCELSIUS ENGAGE 2008?

• Get a holistic view of your business performance by consolidating multiple reports into a single dashboard
• Develop and deploy sophisticated dashboards in just a few hours
• Gain real-time insight into your business performance
• Enable your business users to create live and professional-looking dashboards
• Gain the confidence to take action by evaluating different what-if scenarios
• Transform complex company data into simple, actionable visual information
• Engage, inform and persuade your audience with Xcelsius stunning visualization

FEATURES:

With Xcelsius Engage 2008 you will receive all of the capabilities of Xcelsius Present plus additional key features including:

• Advance visualization components
• Enhanced Crystal Reports 2008 integration
• Live data connectivity to any XML-compliant database
• Live data connectivity to SOAP-based Web services
• Export to Adobe Flash and HTML
• Software Development Kit
• And, more!

System Requirements

Crystal Reports 2008 comes in a single edition that is the feature equivalent of the previous Developer Edition.

• Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack (SP) 2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, or later
• Intel Pentium III or equivalent processor
• 256 MB RAM, 512 Recommended
• 300 MB available hard drive space, 600 MB recommended with Visual Studio .NET integration
• Native, ODBC, OLE DB, and JDBC connectivity to relational, OLAP, web services, XML, legacy, and enterprise data sources, and new salesforce.com driver.

Crystal Xcelsius Engage 2008

• Microsoft Windows XP, Server 2003, Vista
• 1.0 GHz processor
• 1 GB RAM (recommended)
• 350 MB available hard drive space
• Office XP, Office 2003, or Office 2007
• Microsoft Excel 2003/2007, XML compliant databases, SOAP-based Web services

Xcelsius Engage Server also provides connectivity to:

• OLEDB and ODBC compliant data-sources
• Adobe LiveCycle Data Services
• Microsoft Reporting Services

Data and Portal Integrations

• IBM WebSphere Portal, Microsoft SharePoint Portal, Crystal Reports 2008

Product information, specifications, and compatibility are for advisory purposes only, and is the buyers full responsibility to verify with the manufacturer prior to ordering.