crystal report licence in GP

[FaFa168]

Hi All

I am preparing to implement some customized crystal reports with GP 8.0, We have a crystal report disk comes with the GP 8.0. Do we need to buy licence for each client machine ?

Thanks

 

[Dukester0122]

I published Crystal Report in our Citrix server and created reports in other applications. It doesn't restrict users from using it so it should work.

 

[FaFa168]

Thant make sense, since you are actually running one application with multiple instance of it for each logged in user.
But in our case, we need the great plains client be able to view a customized report on their own computer. I guess it's kind of diffrent from that.

Thanks anyway.

 

[jymm]

careful here --- The Business Objects license is VERY vague about some things. One of those is how to 'create' reports and a phrase that goes something like you can only use the software for your "internal business
purposes" --- which throws water on all of the folks developing reports for others in a consulting world. (so I as a consultant could not create a report for you - check out

http://www.kenhamady.com/news.html

if you feel the need).

There are MANY ways around licensing, but knowing if you have to have it for each machine - it really depends on the intent. If the users are changing ANYTHING about the report - they need a license. If they are simply running a report - consider adding the report to an intranet site or similar and putting in paramters from an ASP page (or pick your poison).

Sometime take a look at the license agreement for SQL server (equally vague). In our legal department's opinion we needed a license for everyone that would touch SQL and if they would touch it through an intranet or GP, they needed multiple licenses - so we went unlimited since the cost of the CALs was prohibitive. Crystal/Business Objects licensing language is VERY similar.

so - my 2 cents is that if your company does not worry about a licensing audit --- well...

 

[FaFa168]

Thanks jymm,

I was thinking the same way, I am now trying to build the reports on intranet, and add a button on GP forms, when the user click on that button, IE will pop up with that report, and the query string will pass in the parameters for the report.

The only downside is it will only allow 3 concurrent users, but I guess the 4th people can always keep hiting F5 to wait for first 3 people finish loading.

Thanks

 

[jymm]

have you considered rockton's addin that does just that? Might save you a fair amount of development time.

I do not have it, but the way I understand it the Crystal Report is built right into GP. Since I am on Active Directoy it was easier for me to take some of the reports with an ASP load (similar to what you might get from ReCrystallize) --- but that is outside of GP (which is not a problem for my users, but ymmv) --- PLUS I can have as many users hit the reports as need to since we inserted code at the end to clean up the license (plus I do not have many users).

got any questions - let me know - j