I just got a promo in my mail from Business Objects for a new product suite called “Crystal Vision”. This is actually a combination of Crystal Reports XI, Crystal Xcelsius and a third feature called “Live Office”. I am sure you all know Crystal Reports. I recently wrote an article in my newsletter describing Xcelsius which allows you build and deploy interactive flash based dashboards that read Excel data.

Live Office (which is part of BO Enterprise ) gives you the ability to embed a Crystal Report into an MS office document (spreadsheet, Power Point presentation, etc) and maintain the ability to refresh the data. The plan is for people to embed the report into a spreadsheet using live office and then deploy the spreadsheet data in an Xcelsius dashboard.

Crystal Vision sells for $795 but if you already own a copy of Crystal Reports (v8.5 and above) you can upgrade to Vision for only $495. I found this interesting because Crystal Reports has never set a minimum version for upgrade eligibility. Granted this is not Crystal Reports, but we may find that the next release of Crystal sets a minimum version eligibility for upgrades.

I also found a good review of the product with a pretty good description of how the three products work together.