Enterprise Reporting
There are two main products in the area of Enterprise Reporting, Crystal Reports and Crystal Report Explorer, whilst Live Office is a sister application which integrates with the Microsoft Office set of tools.
Crystal Reports
Crystal Reports has been designed to cover different areas of need in the Business Intelligence world. Crystal Reports itself forms the basis of the ability to create reports, whilst Crystal Xcelsius provides the interactive visual analytical component. Crystal Vision offers an integrated dashboard and reporting suite that allows easy access to any company data. You can then combine this data with a feature rich report and transform the results into an interactive Dashboard. Crystal Reports version 10 is in extensive use today and offers a significantly improved feature set over that of version 9. Several refinements and elements to improve productivity in the elements of the reporting process have also been introduced. It is a proven and popular World Standard solution which helps you design, manage and deliver business reports.
Crystal Xcelsius provides state-of-the-art interactive visual analytics, allowing you to transform your Excel spreadsheets into sophisticated presentations. These can then be shared within PowerPoint, Adobe PDF, Outlook, and the Web. If you want to persuade and inform your audience with deep insights into your business data, so that your business decisions can be better made, Crystal Xcelsius is the program of choice.
Crystal Vision offers business the ability to create dashboards and integrate these with a reporting suite that allows easy access to businesses data. Combined with a feature rich Crystal Report, Vision provides the power to create interactive business dashboards, which unlike other reporting and presentation tools, allows easy interaction with corporate data.
Crystal Reports Explorer
If an organisation is to be competitive, it's staff need to be far more empowered and to be able to do their jobs without having to wait for IT to deliver the data they want in the format they require. This has in part been dealt with, other parts of the BusinessObjects environment delivering the raw data without the need for IT intervention, however, that raw data then needs to be formatted, arranged and tailored. This is just the area that Crystal Reports Explorer has been designed to operate in, allowing your staff to create and modify reports on the Web.
Live Office
The BusinessObjects Live Office application integrates with Microsoft's Office applications, allowing you to distribute reports over the internet. Reports can also be embeded in Office documents. The result, your staff can supply up to the minute corporate data in PowerPoint, Excel or Word documents and using the Web, share them with others in a collaborative decision making process.
One of the main benefits of Live Office is ease of use, it's wizards allowing users to easily access and select the data that they need. Formatting is also made easier as it is carried out using the familiar Office tools set, which in turn means that no extra training is required (in yet another application), which saves both staff time and expense.
BusinessObjects XI Platform thus covers many needs that a modern business has today but as ever careful planning and implementation is required. Therefore, if your organisation is considering implementing a Business Intelligence Solution using Business Objects, Contemporary with our years of experience are sure to be able to assist.
Frequently Asked Questions
Business Intelligence- what is it and what does it offer my organisation?
Q: What is business intelligence?
A: Business intelligence is really about taking all of the information assets from the business, whether it is held in databases or documents, and really, getting the relevant information in the right format out to the organisation that allows them to make better business decisions and drive business efficiency.
Why should I work with a business intelligence partner?
Q: What benefits would an organisation get from working with a business intelligence partner?
A: From our experience there are a number of benefits from working with a specialist in this area. Really, getting someone who has done this and worked in this area before is invaluable. Some of the areas that need to be addressed such as data integrations, reporting performance management are things that can only be achieved through people that have done that process many times, with many organisations. Many of the organisations that have supplied business intelligence solutions will have adopted processes and methodologies that will support this as an implementation in the project, so it’s not about re-inventing the wheel. It is about having been there before. |
