Visual Studio PARTNER SOLUTION BRIEF
ActiveReports Reporting and Business Intelligence Suite for Microsoft Visual Studio.NET Development System

Fast Facts

Partner: GrapeCity | Data Dynamics Web site: http://www.datadynamics.com Industry: Reporting/Business Intelligence Partner Profile GrapeCity, founded in Japan in 1983, is a global solution and services provider on Microsoft technologies. It acquired Data Dynamics and its.NET reporting and BI tools in 2008. It is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Visual Studio Industry Partner (VSIP), and Early Technology Adoption Program (TAP) Partner. Solution Profile Award-winning.NET reporting and business intelligence tools that extend Microsoft Visual Studio.NET with report designing environments and a full.NET SDK that developers can use to embed advanced reporting and business intelligence functionality into their Visual Studio.NET applications. Software and Services Visual Studio 2008 .NET Framework Microsoft Excel Microsoft Report Definition Language (RDL)
If I had had to create the entire solution from scratch, without the help of ActiveReports components, I simply wouldn't have been able to do it.
Daniel Reber, Lead Architect, Precision.BI, LLC

Business Needs

Good quality reporting and business analyses have always been the workhorse of serious.NET business applications. Over the years, reporting requirements have moved up from being a rudimentary listing of records to progressively more complex reports and analysis, based on a variety of data sources, multiple media formats and varied business user requirements. Today, any reporting and BI toolset should be able to span a wide range of reporting and business analysis needs, enabling end users to go from standard reporting to dashboard overviews to deep interactive analysis.
deployment options that made high quality report development and deployments a pain for.NET developers. As the industry matured, developers are faced with a challenge to migrate their applications and end users to meet business reporting and business analysis requirements.

Technical Challenges

.NET developers love the ease of programming using the Microsoft Visual Studio development system. Yet, the earliest versions of Visual Studio did not offer a formal integration interface as it does today. Therefore, it was technically challenging to extend the IDE to offer additional tools and designers to help in report design. ActiveReports was the first product at the time to come out with a report builder. Today, it continues to leverage the excellent integration platform that the Visual Studio.NET product has become to offer: unparalleled ease of use and power to software developers with its tightly integrated reporting and business intelligence tools.

Business Challenges

Before ActiveReports was launched, building and integrating highly scalable, customizable and fast performing reporting features for any.NET application was a challenge. The existing reporting tools were difficult to program, had inflexible architectures and had expensive
2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, Visual Studio, Excel, and SQL members.microsoft.com/customerevidence Server referenced] are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. Document published 06/09

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Microsoft Solution

Pretty much all our plans involve ActiveReports and other Reporting/BI tools as they come out. With the time savings and unique capabilities they providethese components are a key part of our strategy
Daniel Reber, Lead Architect, Precision.BI
ActiveReports for.NET and other reporting tools leverage Microsoft technology to the maximum. All tools have been developed using managed C# and include integrated report builders within Visual Studio.NET and Microsoft Excel spreadsheet software export capabilities. The re-architected version of ActiveReports uses Microsoft SQL Server Report Definition Language (RDL) as its Reporting Format, instead of using proprietary formats as other reporting tools typically do. ActiveReports was the first reporting tool to fully leverage the code behind, event based Visual Studio programming model for almost every reporting feature. In a poll of 100+ respondents, almost 38% respondents voted the nearly unlimited customization capability as their favourite feature. Today, ActiveReports and other products in the suite have over 50,000 registered users world wide and still growing with new products and new frameworks to offer complete reporting and business intelligence needs for.NET developers.
Fast Performance and Multilanguage support from the groundup have enabled customers globally to implement scalable, international solutions on top of Microsofts.NET platform. The new tools in the suite that cover business reporting and business analysis means that customers can use a single toolset to span the complete BI lifecycle,
We believe that by leveraging the Microsoft stack and going broad and interoperable within the reporting and business intelligence category, we will be able to maximize the business value for us and for our customers. We already feature great support for Microsoft Excel integration and have based our new reporting tool on Microsofts Report Definition Language (RDL) format making it an excellent choice to use on top of Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. Our products can be used with Microsofts MVC and LINQ programming frameworks and we are working on introducing Silverlight and other new Microsoft technologies into our product roadmap.

Benefits

In the 2009 customer surveys, the ability to create almost any kind of production reports because of the tight Visual Studio. NET integration and extensive programming model and high overall quality were named as favourite features.
2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, Visual Studio, Excel, and SQL Server referenced] are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. Document published 06/09

Third-Party Components Speed Delivery of Healthcare Business Intelligence Solution
Customer: Precision.BI Web Site: www.precisionbi.com Customer Size: 25 employees Country or Region: United States Industry: Healthcare Partner: GrapeCity Partner Web Site: www.grapecity.com Customer Profile Precision.BI provides business intelligence and clinical intelligence solutions for the healthcare industry. The company is based in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania. Software and Services Microsoft Visual Studio Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional ActiveX Data Objects For more information about other Microsoft customer successes, please visit: www.microsoft.com/casestudies
If I had needed to build the entire solution from scratch, without the help of GrapeCity components, I simply wouldnt have been able to do it.
Daniel Reber, Lead Product Architect, Precision.BI
Precision.BI needed powerful analysis and reporting components for its healthcare business intelligence solution. The company found what it needed in third-party components from GrapeCity, including functionality that enables users to explore huge quantities of data and to generate rich reports on an ad hoc basis. Precision.BI plans to continue taking advantage of GrapeCitys rich components and excellent support as both companies migrate their software to Microsoft Silverlight 3. Business Needs
Healthcare organizations hold vast amounts of data in their IT systems information that, if people could easily access and query it, could be used to drive competitive advantage and profitability. Precision.BI provides a solutionalso called Precision.BIthat employs complex algorithms to help healthcare organizations better analyze and understand the huge amounts of data in their own repositories. In delivering a solution, the developer working on the project faced several challenges. Financial or industrial companies can easily integrate online analytical processing cubes into their solutions, says Daniel Reber, Lead Product Architect at Precision.BI. However, medical data involves so many dimensions that using OLAP makes performance unacceptably slow. Reporting is also a challenge; not only does each organization have its own reporting needs, but individuals within a group also need to be able to design their own custom reports without technical skills.

Solution

Precision.BI found the required capabilities in third-party components from Data Dynamics, which is now a part of GrapeCity. One such component is DynamiCube, which mimics the look and feel of an OLAP cube without the processing overhead, enabling Precision.BI users to explore and summarize huge
quantities of data instantaneously. Precision.BI also used ActiveReports, taking advantage of its application programming interfaces (APIs) to implement an easy-touse report designer that enables end users to make queries and generate reports on an ad hoc basis. The current version of the solution was developed using the Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional development system. Moving forward, Precision.BI will use the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 development system to rewrite its application on the Microsoft Silverlight 3 browser plug-in and Windows Presentation Foundation. The company will replace DynamiCube with a Silverlight 3based version of Data Dynamics Analysis, which GrapeCity plans to make available in early 2010. The component combines analysis, visualization, and reporting and is highly programmable so that Precision.BI developers can tailor the applications look and feel to meet users needs. For reporting, Precision.BI plans to use the Silverlight 3based version of Data Dynamics Reports (also scheduled for future release), which, with little coding on the part of developers, enables end users to quickly create mini-reports with simple drag-anddrop gestures. Precision.BI also will use ActiveReports for Microsoft.NET, which is slightly more complicated but provides users with greater capabilities in formatting reportsas well as the ability to export data to formats such as Microsoft Office Excel or Adobe Portable Document Format.

Benefits of the companys buy what you can and build the rest approach include: Superior developer output. With GrapeCity components, Precision.BI is able to deliver a good deal more functionality than otherwise possible. I was the only developer working on this project for many years, says Reber. If I had needed to build the entire solution from scratch, without the help of GrapeCity components, I simply wouldnt have been able to do it. Strong technical support. Reber also attributes his success to the excellent support that GrapeCity has provided. When we run into a problem, they get back to us right away, either with a fix or a workaround, says Reber. I initially chose DynamiCube and ActiveReports because they were the only components available that had the capabilities I needed, and Ive stayed with GrapeCity all these years because of their great support. Rich features. GrapeCity components provide unique capabilities, which, as Reber puts it, make both my life and end users lives easier. A feature of Data Dynamics Analysis that he particularly appreciates is the ease of moving between numerical data and graphs and charts. Not only can end users view the data in both numbers and graphs, but we can easily modify graph size, color, and other features to help them quickly grasp whats happening, he says. And without DynamiCube, we probably wouldnt even have a crosstab module. Consistent API model. Reber also likes the fact that GrapeCity components work well together and have consistent, rich APIs. The APIs all have the same look and feel, so after you learn one, you
can easily work with the others, he says. Plus, the components expose a lot of APIs, which gives us plenty of flexibility and makes them highly extensible. Using the exposed APIs, we can create applications that make it easy for end users to tailor queries and reports to get the data they need. Because of its 10-year history of successful partnership with the vendor, as Precision.BI maps out future products, GrapeCity components will continue to play a major role. Pretty much all our plans involve GrapeCity components, says Reber. With the time savings and unique capabilities they provide, plus the great support we get from GrapeCity, theyre a key part of our technology strategy.

Benefits

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 is the worlds most popular development environment for designing, developing, and testing next-generation Windows-based solutions and Web applications and services. By improving the development experience for Windows, the Web, mobile devices, and Microsoft Office, Visual Studio 2008 helps organizations deliver a variety of solutions more productively than ever before. Visual Studio Team System expands the product line with new software tools that enable greater communication and collaboration throughout the development life cycle. Interaction between developers and designers is enhanced through the use of Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft Expression Studio. With Visual Studio 2008, businesses can deliver modern service-oriented solutions more efficiently. For more information about Visual Studio 2008, go to: msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
By using the Visual Studio development system together with GrapeCity components, Precision.BI is able to deliver rich applications with limited development resources.
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Document published July 2009