Have you heard of Denali or Project “Crescent”?

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What is Denali or Project “Crescent”?

Project “Crescent” is about interactively visualizing data, quickly gaining analytical insights, and generally having fun with data!

Crescent is reporting services’ new reporting tool targeted at data consumers to visually explore their data, answer ad-hoc questions with ease, and to present and collaborate with others in a SharePoint environment. Crescent is a thin browser experience and is working against a BI Semantic Model. BI Semantic Model is available on the client through the Excel-based Power Pivot modeling tool, or on the server through Analysis Services Tabular project with Denali CTP3.

Self Service Alerting
Alerting is a capability of enables an end-user to setup alert rules and be alerted when report data changes occur that match a set of rules. No changes are required to the existing reports – you can create alerts for any reports created in previous versions of Reporting Services, as soon as upgrade/move to SQL Server Denali in SharePoint integrated mode.

SharePoint Shared Service
Reporting Services in SharePoint now runs as a SharePoint shared service. Among other benefits, this provides integration with claims authentication and scaling and load-balancing across the SharePoint farm. Furthermore, report viewing performance in SharePoint has been enhanced significantly.

Excel rendering as XLSX, Word rendering as DOCX
These new renderers produce now Open XML Office format and take advantage of some of the new capabilities in Office 2007 and 2010, such as export up to a 1 million rows in Excel. The original renderers for DOC and XLS, which produce binary formats for older Office versions are still available but hidden by default.

BI Development Studio integrated in Visual Studio 2010
Not only did we adopt the Visual Studio 2010 shell for BI Development Studio for report design, but we also re-architected our integration with Visual Studio in general for RDLC designer and report viewer controls. This will be available with the upcoming next version of Visual Studio and enable much more simultaneous availability of SQL Server Reporting Services functionality in Visual Studio as well.

You can watch the Demo for SQL Server Project "Crescent” here and find out more details of Project “Crescent” here.

The feature pack for SQL Server “Denali” CTP3 is available here.