Last week Business Objects unveiled Crystal Reports 2008. Due to be generally available in November, the release sports some interesting new features, led by the integration with Crystal Xcelsius, a companion product for creating rich, interactive charts and dashboards. Crystal needed a pick-me-up like that, and I always love it when companies integrate with their own products. The Xcelsius integration will allo Last week Business Objects unveiled Crystal Reports 2008. Due to be generally available in November, the release sports some interesting new features, led by the integration with Crystal Xcelsius, a companion product for creating rich, interactive charts and dashboards. Crystal needed a pick-me-up like that, and I always love it when companies integrate with their own products. The Xcelsius integration will allow Crystal writers to create reports with rich Flash content. It doesn’t stop there, either. You can also incorporate Flash content directly, by embedding SWF (Shockwave Flash) files into reports or linking to them on the Web. The Flash doesn’t have to come from Xcelsius.It’s always the features that seem to be the smallest that turn out to be a really big deal. This is the case with the new sort controls. These new controls allow you to sort your report data without making a roundtrip to the database. This is a big deal because users will quite often sort their reports many different ways during a single viewing session, and the numerous roundtrips can tax the network, the database, and the user’s patience in busy environments. The new sort controls could reduce the load significantly under the right circumstances. Another excellent new feature is flexible pagination. Not only can you precisely control the size of the page by specifying the number of records to display, but you can also have any mix of portrait and landscape pages that you like. This will make wide charts easier to view and to print. It’s a novel concept: pick the page layout based on the content.Those are just a few of the important new goodies added to Crystal Reports 2008. Some of the others include built-in barcode support, a hyperlinking wizard, crosstab enhancements, and improved XML exporting. For customers of BusinessObjects Enterprise XI, there’s also report bursting, a way to streamline the mass distribution of personalized reports. For a more thorough look at these and other new features, keep an eye out for my full review in November. Crystal Reports 2008 Availability: GA November 2007 Price: $495 for single edition Verdict: Crystal Reports 2008 has promising features for Crystal designers, Crystal users, and Business Objects shops. Although Flash and Xcelsius integration may not get used by the bulk of Crystal constituents, most everyone will use the slew of quieter improvements such as the new sort controls, which promise to reduce bandwidth and improve the user experience, and flexible pagination, which will be a big deal for those who like to print their reports. In all, this release has a lot of promise. Technology Industry