Webcast: ActiveReports - An Introduction

Recently I hosted a webinar for an audience who were new to ActiveReports. We called it ActiveReports - An Introduction. After a great response during registration, I was looking forward to interacting with the audience during the sessions. The audience did not let me down. We had a great turnout for both sessions. During each session, we touched upon the ActiveReports history of over 15 years. From its beginnings as a Visual Basic 6 COM reporting tool, ActiveReports has become a trusted reporting tool for developers looking to embed reports in Visual Studio projects. Even predating the Visual Studio .NET IDE, ActiveReports customers have been providing rich market insights that help to direct our product roadmap. We are very fortunate to have a 300,000+ developer community to interact with in our forums and social media networks. Since this session was focused on introducing ActiveReports to a new audience, I started off with some review of the "What's In It for Me" aspects of the product line. Some of the benefits and common use cases we covered included:

• The ActiveReports Visual Studio-integrated report designer
• The embeddable End User Report Designer
• The variety of report types
• The integration with ActiveReports Server

We all know that actions speak louder than words, so we jumped right into successive walkthroughs of use cases to introduce some features of the following:

• ActiveReports Visual Studio-integrated report designer
• ActiveReports End User Designer
• ActiveReports Server
• ActiveReports Server Report Designer Add-on

We had a very interactive audience in both of the sessions and spent time answering questions across a wide range of topics. Unfortunately, we did not have enough time to address all of the questions. We will reach out and provide answers to those un-answered questions for you all. During the session, we also ran a few polls. The most interesting one was about what people look for in a reporting tool to help them implement reports in their products. Most were looking for the controls available in the reporting tool and for a report designer that is integrated with Visual Studio. An extensive API and server-side execution were not far behind in importance. You can review the webinar on demand using the link here.

Our audience gave us some topics to cover in upcoming webinars. We will plan for more of these sessions in the near future. To see what is coming and to see recordings of earlier sessions, visit our webinar page. In the meantime, I would love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to reach out to us through email, forums, twitter (@activereports) or any of the other social channels mentioned in our Contact Us page.