Crystal 9/ePortfolio

[dianemarie]

Hello, we are using ePortfolio as a viewer for our users to run Crystal 9 reports. We instruct the users to select ActiveX in their Preferences. We have found this to be the most user-friendly. ePortfolio is not overly popular right now, but one thing they like is the ability to create shortcuts in their Favorites folder. Most of our users run a core of 5-10 reports, and we have over 250 reports in a fairly large folder structure. The advantage of defaulting to their Favorites folder and having their commonly used reports all in one place has been one of the few bright lights as we convert from compiled reports to the web. ActiveX shows the report name, and a "View" link under the report name that you click on to run the report. On a fairly regular basis, we are losing that View link in the users' favorite folders. The report itself in the Public folders is fine, but in order for them to get their Favorites shortcut link working again, they have to recreate the shortcut. Anyone know what's going on? Thank you.

 

[charltonc]

I don't know how to answer your question.

But I need your help!
because I am considering using Eportfolio.

Would you recommend it? and what version of Crystal Enterprise did you purchase?

Is it reliable?

thanks a ton!

 

[dianemarie]

Hi, I was being stupid. I had changed the name of the report when I edited it and saved it, and obviously it killed the shortcut.

ePortfolio isn't bad, it has some minor annoyances and also some benefits. Nothing stellar one way or the other, it's sort of the same for the enduser. Exporting and printing have been simplified, but e-mailing is done through scheduling and is kind of ugly. We direct the users to export to Word and then do a File-Send To-Mail Recipient As Attachment instead of using the scheduling component, which is not enduser-friendly. We're on Enterprise 9. The Management Console is a good tool (it allows you to set up users, permissions, folders, manage the reports, monitor which licenses are currently being used, stuff like that). All our employees (over 250) run their own reports, and at first we thought they had to use the Management Console also. But that's kind of dangerous to let them in there, and then we found out about ePortfolio. eP is the user interface for running the new web reports. I think it's the only option for getting Crystal reports out to the users? We had to go to 9 because Crystal apparently is no longer supporting compiled reports. The cost increase was huge, and quite honestly we are now seriously looking at Microsoft's new reporting. Not that we plan to jump ship anytime soon but we'll be running reports side by side and see where the chips fall. I'm just a developer and our super brilliant network guy took care of all the server backend setup, so I can't answer any questions about that. Hope this helps though.