Business Objects Expands Reporting Capabilities for Microsoft Office

Business Wire, May 24, 2004

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

Microsoft TechED 2004

SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 24, 2004

Crystal Enterprise Live Office Enables Users to Easily Integrate

Active Data from Crystal Reports into Microsoft Office Excel,

PowerPoint, and Word Documents

Business Objects (Nasdaq:BOBJ)(Euronext Paris ISIN code: FR0004026250 - BOB), the world's leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced the launch of Crystal Enterprise(TM) Live Office. This solution allows Microsoft Office users to easily embed live reports and report components in the 2000, 2002, and 2003 versions of Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office Excel, Microsoft Office PowerPoint, and Microsoft Office Outlook. Crystal Enterprise Live Office will help broaden the use of BI, while allowing organizations to secure and manage information centrally.

"Crystal Reports and Microsoft Office applications, especially Excel, are by far the most ubiquitous business intelligence tools in use today," said Mike Schiff, vice president of data warehousing and business intelligence at Current Analysis, a leading industry research and analysis firm. "By enabling business users to more easily integrate content from Crystal Reports into the Microsoft Office applications they already work with on every day, organizations can readily expand their overall BI capabilities."

Crystal Enterprise Live Office enables business users to gain access to the world's leading enterprise reporting solution, to help them make decisions based on timely, accurate data. Providing tight integration with Microsoft Office gives users a familiar format from which to take advantage of corporate data without relying on IT.

"We are very excited to see Business Objects further extend its commitment to business users through tighter integration with the Microsoft Office System," said Simon Marks, product manager for Office at Microsoft Corp. "By integrating Crystal Enterprise with the Microsoft Office System, Crystal Enterprise Live Office can help empower business users with accurate, consistent corporate data."

Using Crystal Enterprise Live Office, end users can easily connect to and select the data they need using an integrated wizard and navigation bar within Microsoft Office. This flexible, self-service access enables users to connect directly to business-friendly views of the data or to data fields in existing Crystal reports. Business users can also embed reusable report components such as tables, charts, and graphics in their documents, by selecting and inserting parts of their corporate reports through an integrated report viewer. The solution also allows users to use the full formatting, calculation, and reorganization capabilities of Microsoft Office.

Crystal Enterprise Live Office also ensures that the corporate data embedded into Microsoft Office files remains timely, consistent, and secure. The solution leverages the power of Crystal Enterprise, so data is extracted from corporate reports that have been managed by IT for quality, consistency, and accuracy. Furthermore, the resulting Microsoft Office files retain the same security features originally applied to the data, ensuring that only people with approved access will be able to view the information.

In addition, Live Office provides powerful capabilities for distributing, refreshing, and validating corporate documents. Users can share their files with others inside and outside their organization by posting Office files to Crystal Enterprise for hosting within Microsoft SharePoint deployments. Individuals can also refresh the data in their document with the click of a button, which helps make sure that they are using the most up to date and accurate information. Finally, for document recipients who want to understand the source of the embedded information, they can easily view the underlying reports used to create the document - helping to provide confidence in the data being used to make decisions.

"In many organizations, users commonly store static data in Excel spreadsheets and Word documents on their own desktop - causing the data to become out of date and inconsistent with other documents," said Chris Caren, vice president of worldwide product marketing at Business Objects. "Crystal Enterprise Live Office solves this problem for millions of Microsoft Office users around the world, by extending the power of the world's most widely deployed enterprise reporting product directly into the desktop applications people work with every day."

Availability

Crystal Enterprise Live Office will be delivered as an add-on for Crystal Enterprise Professional Edition, and included in Crystal Enterprise Premium. The solution is expected to be generally available by the middle of June 2004. For more information on this solution, please visit http://www.businessobjects.com/TechEd/.> About Business Objects

Business Objects is the world's leading business intelligence (BI) software company. Business intelligence enables organizations to track, understand, and manage enterprise performance. The company's solutions leverage the information that is stored in an array of corporate databases, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and customer relationship management (CRM) systems.