We have made a number of changes since the last version of ActiveReports Server. Here are the major ones:

Administrator role for groups in Active Directory

With this feature, the Administrator role is automatically granted to the users who log-in to the ActiveReports Server with the Active Directory server groups that are listed in 'ARS Admin Groups' field. 

For more information, see Using LDAP and Active Directory for Single Sign-On .

Templates Feature

The new templates feature has been introduced to allow users to use templates while creating reports in the Web Designer. Templates can be uploaded by an administrator on the Administration portal using the Upload template button (supported file formats are .rdl and .rdx) and can be viewed in the Templates list on the Templates page. An administrator can also convert a template into a report and a report into template.

For more information, see Templates.

JS Viewer (Beta)

JS Viewer is a new lightweight viewer now available with ActiveReports 12 Server. This viewer allows for faster report rendering with rich interactivity. Not only do the reports respond faster, but since the server is freed up sooner, your deployment can scale even better. The JS Viewer is currently in beta.

Monitoring Workers State

An administrator can now view the current tasks of each agent along with the details about status of the task as Idle or Busy, and the description and priority of tasks. The status of tasks is updated real-time in the new Workers section on the Agents page of the Administration site. For more information, see Managing Agents.

Send Report by Email in HTML5 Viewer

You can now send a report by email while previewing the report in HTML5 Viewer. Just enter the necessary details about sender, select the document format to be sent as link or as an attachment, and click send. For more information, see Send a Report by Email. 

Schedule Retain Text and Copy Task

While modifying a scheduled task, you can benefit from a few improvements that have been introduced to the Report Portal. Now, when you change the schedule template settings, other settings of the schedule remain unchanged, provided the Delivery type option is same. Also, a new Copy task button is introduced that allows users to create a new schedule task with the settings of an existing schedule task. For more information, see Scheduling Reports.

Immediate Execution of Scheduled Tasks

Now you can run any saved scheduled task immediately by clicking the new Run once button. Once the task execution is complete, you can view the results under the History tab. For more information, see Scheduling Reports.

Create and Edit Shared Data Sets

The Administration dashboard adds new functionalities - create data set and edit data set - that allow creating and editing shared data sets directly on the browser, without any dependency on ActiveReports Developer.

Support for CSV Export

The CSV export is now available in HTML5 Report Viewer. You can now also choose to save the reports to CSV format while scheduling tasks.

Improved Performance with Large Reports

The report previewing experience with large reports (1000+ pages) has been significantly improved. The administrator can now control the page limit for the reports being rendered by end users on the viewers. Also, the users can choose to stop whole report from rendering and preview only a partial report. With these improvements, large reports are rendered in less time, which in turn saves server memory, and lowers CPU usage.

For more information, see Site Settings.

Enhancements in Web Designer

The HTML5 technology based ActiveReports Web Designer has received many enhancements including support for Page Reports, Sub-Reports, Templates, enhanced Themes and Styles support, and optimizations for reports based on Semantic Data Models. With these end users now have even more power and flexibility to design and publish reports on the fly from any browser. For more information, see Get Started with ActiveReports Web Designer.
Some more improvements are:

• Text orientation for chart title and labels: With the new Text Orientation property, you can control the orientation chart titles and label text for chart axes points. The available options are Auto, Angle, Horizontal, Rotated90, Rotated270, and Stacked.
• Appearance of series line in Column and Bar charts: The new Series Line Style properties allow you to apply settings - Style, Width, and Color - for series in Column and Bar charts (Stacked and PercentStacked). These properties are available on selecting a Chart's Plot area.
• Support for more controls: The Web Designer now supports Barcode and Formatted Text controls.
• New dataset query filter in semantic reports: The new dataset query filter in rdl reports adds more flexibility and performance to filtering data in a semantic dataset.
• Double line style for Line control: The new 'Double' line style property is now available for Line control along with other line styles such as Solid, Dashed, Dotted, DashDot, and DashDotDot. The Double line style allows setting double lines with the specified gap in-between the lines.
• Intelligent data models: We have improved the behavior of semantic data models in the Web Designer and now data model relations are determined intuitively when a semantic data model is created, meaning that the main entity of a data model is displayed automatically as the top of the data set.
• Design visually appealing reports with ease: While designing reports, the default styles are now automatically applied to the controls that support style feature (Table, Tablix, Chart, Bullet, and Sparkline). So the users don't need to set the styles manually each time they add new control. The default styles can be later easily modified from the Style property.
• Data set refresh: Now when a shared data set gets modified, you can refresh this data set in a report that uses it. When opening such a report in the Web Designer, a notification message will specify what data fields have been changed and ask you to save the report with a new data set version.