Crystal vs Actuate reporting

Guys,

Could anyone tell me how Crystal is different from Actuate reporting? I am basically an Actuate report developer and wondering how flexible is Cystal reporting. My knowledge of Crystal is very limited (with ver 7) We are planning to move away from Actuate possibly to Crystal provided if it is flexible enough to do everything. How easy/difficult to do the following...

1. DB Connection: Can I Connect to different DBs? Read UserID/Password info from a text file or a table instead of defining in the report?
2. Drop-down parameters: Dynamically populating parameter values from DB into the Drop-down.
3. Can I control whats goes into the drop-down box based on the user role.
4. Generate reports where the data comes from multiple DBs.
5. Page-leve security
6. Drill-down reporting - Tree view
7. Dynamic Cross-Tab reports -
8. LDAP Integrating
9. Single Sign-on
10. Output in PDF/Excel
etc...

Please point out if these feature are available out of the box. I looked at the latest version features and it says we can do it all. I would like to hear from you what you think whats possible and what not with out much effort.

Thanks,
PSGuys,

I am very sure some of you have used not all but at least some of these tasks. I would appreciate it if you could respond to only those tasks and comment how easy/difficult to do for a beginner. Whats available out of the box. We can directly talk to sales guys but we do not think we get the correct picture unless you talk to people who is actually using the product.

Thanks a lot for your time.

PSsql