# Introduction to Ripplestone

Ripplestone is a portal that enables you to easily deploy documents on your intranet or external web site. Ripplestone currently supports the following documents:

- Crystal Reports
- Microsoft Word
- Microsoft Excel
- Microsoft PowerPoint
- Adobe Acrobat
- Hyperlinks

Ripplestone gives you these primary features:

- Web-based distribution of Crystal Reports.
- Web-based report publishing.
- A user security system.
- Row level security that controls access to report data.
- Report Scheduling.
- Automated report distribution via e-mail, FTP, Network and/or Printer.
- Enhanced alert reporting.
- Web-based administration and setup.

## How it Works

After a document or report is created it is published to Ripplestone using the administrative interface.

Published documents are organized by folders. The system administrator has complete control over who can access documents by using the security system that is a part of Ripplestone. When published documents are run they will open in either a viewer or the application they were created with. For example, Word documents are opened within Word and Crystal Reports are opened with the Crystal Report viewer.