Self-Service Reporting Technology Acquired

The recent acquisition of ActiveViews could help Microsoft provide self-service reporting in SQL Server Reporting Services, a free add-on for SQL Server 2000 that helps developers create and publish or distribute human-readable reports. Although ActiveViews has never shipped a product, it has been working on technology that allows end users to construct detailed personal or ad hoc reports from SQL Server databases without requiring them to possess SQL Server programming skills or understand SQL Server concepts and data structures.

Complements SQL Server Reporting Services

The ActiveViews acquisition is intended to complement Reporting Services, which was released in Jan. 2004, by allowing nontechnical users to create reports.

Reporting Services includes Report Designer, a graphical environment for creating reports, but this tool requires Visual Studio .NET 2003, making it unsuitable for business users. In contrast, ActiveViews offers a simple report-creation client through which business users can design and publish reports. ActiveViews runs on top of Reporting Services, using Reporting Services for lower-level functions such as report management and delivery.