Intelligent Enterprise

The Crystal Reports Viewer XI is an Acrobat Reader-style viewing client for Crystal Reports. Released today, the free, downloadable software lets you open and explore Crystal Reports documents, and you can generate customized views without placing demands on the report designer.

While some reporting environments rely on static document viewing and printing formats, this approach limits the ability of the user to explore the data. Crystal Reports Viewer XI lets you drill down into the report tables and save personalized views. This reduces the burden on IT and report developers to come up with customized reports. Users can share their files in native .rpt format via e-mail or on the secure crystalreports.com on-demand platform.

Customer and partner testing of the next release of the DB2 9 database began last week as IBM unveiled the beta version of what's code named "Viper 2." The update is said to offer enhanced security and workload management features including:
• Automated, hands-off fail over for high availability
• Greater flexibility and granularity in security, auditing and access control
• Simplified memory management and increased customization capabilities

IBM this week announced self-learning content classification software designed to automatically categorize large volumes of information. The offerings are intended to help organizations find content and understand whether it's important and how it should be handled. The software is particularly aimed at classifying content that is unmanaged so it can be more easily found and retrieved.

It's not a SaaS offering and it's not a dummied-down business intelligence (BI) platform with features and functions removed to meet a target price point. To lower the cost barrier to BI, LogiXML offers the alternative of subscription-based licensing of its complete Web-based BI Platform, which includes ad hoc reporting, OLAP reporting, dashboarding, BI data services, security and managed reporting with a range of output options.

The enterprise content management market has split into two camps in recent years. One camp, lead by Microsoft, provides basic content services, while the other, lead by IBM/FileNet, Open Text and EMC, provides highly scalable ECM platforms with extensive portfolios of horizontal and industry-specialized content applications. Xerox straddles both camps, offering both its low-cost DocuShare 6.0 system for basic content management as well as DocuShare CPX, a beefier but still relatively low-cost system for advanced content management and workflow-enabled applications.

On the eve of this week's AIIM Conference & Expo in Boston, Xerox today announced version 6.0 upgrades of both DocuShare and DocuShare CPX offering more robust and extensive support for document imaging as well as beefed up workflow and e-forms capabilities.

Business rules show up in a lot of applications. Call centers employ rules for routing, exception-handling, escalation and approvals. Financial services set up transactional and administrative rules based on deal value, customer status and regulatory scrutiny. Security software embeds access security rules. And as always, rules are made to be broken, so software developers ideally want something that business users can change without having to go to IT to alter code.

On-demand Web analytics service provider Omniture has launched Discover 2.0, a visual data exploration tool designed to uncover business opportunities, new customer acquisition strategies and ways to drive more revenue from online marketing campaigns. Complementing Omniture's SiteCatalyst Web analytics service, Discover 2.0 is said to support unlimited segmentation of online customers and site visitors.

Reusability is a key to successful services-oriented architecture deployments, but there are three requirements when attempting to find and reuse services. First, service owners must be able to know and inspect the policies inside each service he or she maintains. Second, service users must be able to discover services and understand just what they do in business terms. Finally, service developers need to respond quickly to change requests.

It's notoriously hard to get real-time process data out of the black box of SAP, yet such measures are crucial to improving any process dependent upon the ERP system. webMethods Optimize for SAP, a business activity monitoring (BAM) module introduced February 12, is designed to provide instant access to in-process performance indicators and decision criteria locked in SAP.