As I’m sure you’ve noticed, Microsoft is my #1 software of choice, both here and at work-but I am also a fan of Crystal Reports (now from SAP).
Crystal Reports Server 2008 is their very successful product for serving up reports with automating & scheduling capabilities-and this month, it got a Service Pack. It added a number of new features but the 2 that I find most interesting are:
Report Bursting:
Report Bursting allows you to run a report once and produce subsets of results specific to different users; this is used to generate bank statements for example. This feature was previously only available in the more enterprise products from SAP-but is now available to the mid-market 🙂 I see this being a huge benefit to a lot of our customers…
Auditing: Report Auditing allows companies to see who is viewing what reports, when, for how long etc, which can be very useful for ensuring that your Business Intelligence (BI) efforts are paying off and being found relevant by users.
There are a number of other features around Sharepoint and .NET integration that I will detail a little later…
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 