Actuate releases reporting software for e-business

Call Center Solutions, Aug 1999

Delivering effective online business also means providing a high volume of secure, customized content to thousands of customers. Actuate Corporation has designed its Actuate e.Reporting Suite 4 to automate the creation and delivery of high-volume, structured, personalized content to ebusiness Web sites. Actuate e.Reports enable e-businesses to differentiate their services by providing users with instant access to high-resolution content from application and database information with the look, feel and infrastructure of a company's e-business Web site.

Users can search and navigate highresolution, personalized content in e.Reports that are viewable in a pure browser via Dynamic HTML (DHTML) requiring no plug-ins and no Java download. When a user initiates a request to view a page of an e.Report over the Web, the e.Report Server renders the pages as DHTML using a highperformance rendering engine and delivers this page to the user complete with a customizable DHTML Viewer.

The DHTML Viewer is a set of DHTML pages that provide content navigation functionality, Smart Search capabilities and an automatically generated, fully customizable Nav Bar. The Actuate e.Report Server processes all of these activities to ensure that minimal amount of data is transported to the user's desktop.

The interface for viewing, navigating and interacting with Actuate content is based on a series of customizable templates. Developers can build e.Reports that access any data source, perform any calculation, compose any format and seamlessly integrate with any Web site. They can also customize any aspect of the DHTML Viewer, such as the Nav Bar or Smart Search interface, so that users will be unaware they are interacting with Actuate content.

Actuate 4's Page Security mechanism provides secure, personalized views of information contained in a single document produced by a single query. The developer defines the security rules for information when the report is designed. When the report is run, the rules are used to create an Access Control List (ACL) for each page of the report. When the report is viewed, information concerning the user's identity is compared against the ACL for each page in the report to determine what pages the user can see.

Actuate e.Reports can be generated on-demand and viewed immediately, or generated on schedule and chached, to be viewed later, and the Open Server feature allows reports written in languages like C or tools like Crystal Reports to be accessed and scheduled as well as any Actuate e.Report.

The Actuate e.Reporting System provides report scheduling capabilities that are used to execute and distribute reports on a regular basis, and Automatic Archival enables documents to be automatically deleted or archived from the system.

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