CE 8 Install Confusion

[rockman20]

I am going to apologize way in advance if this wastes peoples time. Hopefully I can find some answers though.

I have a bunch of reports that I have created with CR 8.5 on my machine. I would like to be able to share these reports to all of the schools. (I work for a school district at the central office)

I was thinking that the CE 8 that came with out CR 8.5 would be the answer. But I have no idea what the heck I am doing.

We do have a webserver running that handles the website that allows parents to see how their students are doing in school. I was hoping to utilize this server for the time being and possibly getting something for just Crystal in the future if it looks like this will work.

The server is a HP DL360-G3 with a Intel Xeon processor running at 2.8 Ghz, 1GB of RAM, 2 SCSI-RAID drives for a total of 72.8GB of space. The OS is Win2K Advanced Server and it does have SQL2000 for the database for the parent website. (However this is not the live database I pull information from. It is basically a mirror of the actual live data that sits on 2 other seperate servers that are also running Win2K Advanced and SQL2000.

I installed CE on the web server but now I have absolutely no idea what I am doing. (I have written HTML code and posted websites to places like Angelfire, but I have no idea how to host a website)

I was reading through the install documents and got concerned when it said that basically everything except for the web stuff needs to be on the same box. Is this true? Can anyone shed some light on what I need to do to test out the CE 8?

Or is there a better way for me to share these reports? These will be regular, daily ran reports.

*lost and confused*

Thanks for any help! If I missed anything, please ask questions! Thanks!

 

[synapsevampire]

The CE8 that comes with CR 8.5 is limited to 5 licenses, and you may be subject to the Broadcast Licensing if you automatically export, and, well, Crystal has lots of gotchas.

There are other ways to share reports via the WEB, or via Windows, all of which are expensive to implement in either code or licensing.

I would suggest that you contact Crystal directly to get an idea of costs, and if you're up to the task of using ASP, Crystal has lots of examples:

http://support.businessobjects.com/fix/samplescr.asp?ref=default.asp_selectlist#04

-k

 

[rockman20]

Interesting on all the little "gotchya's" they have. So here is another question then. We do have a Crystal Reports viewer available. I know that a few people here have used it to open some files sent from outside of our district.

Does anyone know the limitations to this viewer? Will it view any report created with Crystal? Does it allow logging into the database, parameter fields, etc?

Since we are a school district, cost is always of importance. So does anyone have any experience using the Crystal Reports viewer? Know of any limitations, etc?