A decided advantage

Crystal Decisions claims that Version 9 of its reporting software addresses three important areas for the developer and IT community: improved productivity and high efficiency in report creation, the need for tight integration of reporting into enterprise Web applications and the need for dynamic user access, interaction and modification.

The company says that Crystal Reports allows the transformation of data from virtually any source--including XML, OLAP, enterprise and relational data sources--into interactive content. Further, it says, developers and IT professionals can tightly integrate content into .NET, Java and COM applications for user viewing, interaction and modification, and can give users the ability to access and navigate report elements via wireless devices, portals and Microsoft Office documents.

The company says that among the 50 new features are:

Report Application Server, which enables developers to integrate reporting into enterprise Web applications for users to view, interact with and modify.

Report Parts, which allows developers to integrate parts of report content into business workflows.

Component Reuse, which permits developers to share and reuse existing reporting components across multiple reports for single-point updating and more productive report development and integration.