Ripplestone Security Features

Ripplestone offers online web site reporting software with user security that allows you to control who can access the web site reporting tool, which Crystal Reports they can run and includes row-level security.

Control access to the web based reporting in one of three ways:

• Forms Authentication - Use the login page that comes with Ripplestone (forcing the user to sign-in when they want to run a Crystal web report).
• Integrated Windows Security - With integrated Windows security, the user is not prompted to sign-in. As long as you have granted that user's Windows User ID access to the Ripplestone database, the user is automatically granted access to web reports.
• Trusted System - Using trusted system a Ripplestone administrator can add the name of a trusted application.  From that trusted application a call can be made to Ripplestone that passes the UserID of a valid user.  Ripplestone will validate the user and by pass the login form.

After accessing Ripplestone, a user sees only those reports that they have been granted access to. This is achieved using folder-level security. Crystal Reports (.rpt files) are stored on the web server in folders. A user will only see those folders (and thus those web based Crystal Reports) that you have granted them access to.

The security features of Ripplestone have been implemented using security roles (similar in concept to Windows groups). Individual users are assigned to roles. Roles are then granted access to folders.

Row Level Security

Row level security enables a user to dynamically change the information in a report so there aren't different versions of the same report for different users. For example, assume you have a report that summarizes your organization’s budget by department, but you don’t want each department to see each other’s budget information.

Historically, users have been forced to have different versions of the same report for each department. But row level security changes that. If someone from the Operations department logs into Ripplestone and runs the budget report, they will only see information for their department. Whereas if someone from IT runs that same report, they will only see information on the IT department.

You can view a demonstration of Row Level Security on our training page.

Dynamic Pick Lists

Pick lists for parameters that are created in Crystal Reports are static lists. The contents of the pick list does not change unless list of default values is manually changed in the crystal report.

Ripplestone allows the user to use a query to populate a pick list. This way, the pick list always accurately reflects the contents of the database. For example, if you have a parameter for customer and a new customer is added, the new customer will automatically be present in the pick list with Dynamic Pick Lists.

Automated Report Distribution Using E-Mail, FTP, FAX Network File Transfers & yes PDA.

Do you spend a lot of time distributing copies of your reports to various people in your organization? Ripplestone can help. You can maintain an e-mail distribution list for each report, so you can e-mail a report in Excel or PDF format to multiple people, all in just a few clicks of the mouse.

Report Scheduling

Using Ripplestone, a user has the ability to easily schedule reports to be run on an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis. Users can schedule reports to run in a chronological order, based on a series of events such as database backup and run reports based on dependencies or processed events.

Put Image of Scheduling Section Here.

Scheduled reports can be either displayed on the web or automatically e-mailed to users.  Scheduled reports can be exported in a variety of formats like Excel, Word, HTML, PDF and many others.  Control of which users have the ability to schedule reports is done through Ripplestone administration.  Authorized schedulers can schedule their own reports to run.