Whats the story with Toucan Reporter 2007?

Since releasing Bambuco in November, I've been working on getting the next version of Toucan Reporter ready. We're getting pretty close I think. We've had a major rethink about how people use Toucan Reporter. Initially, I thought teams would have one or two 'reporting experts' on them who would design and (crucially) generate reports to be use by others both inside the team and outside of it. The design reflected that use.

Turns out, that isn't what people really do, or not all of them anyway. There are two camps of users - report designers and people who want to see the reports right now without needing anyone else. To accommodate these two groups, Toucan Reporter 2007 has two modes of working - Designer mode and 'Just gimme the report preview' mode where the designer is hidden. Of course, you can switch between these two modes dynamically.

The other big change is that the new version is a proper multi-document application. There's a proper menu with File|Open, and all reports share the same parent window and menu. We've also taken out some of the more obscure report settings, favoring ease of use over customizability.

There's some other new stuff coming - better rendering to text documents, much nicer PDF output, full-screen previews and a new report wizard which makes it a lot easier to create multi-table reports.

We are going to be a more generous with the free version. It will work 100% the same as the paid-for version except that it will only print if you've less than fifty records in your Groove Forms tool. You'll get all the same access to the wizard, all the same export formats and all the same report features while you're getting used to Toucan Reporter, and I hope you'll be able to make the decision to put it into production use much more easily as a result.

Right now, the plan is to go with a public beta in the second week of January, which will close at the end of the month. At that point, there will be a price increase to $100. Anyone who buys during the beta period pay the old price of $70. Existing customers will of course get the new version for free.