Posting Crystal Reports to an intranet

[IsThisOneTaken2]

Sorry to say I have very little experience with Crystal Reports, but am helping a friend research...

How can we put C Reports on an intranet as to share them wiht users who do not have the product installed. My understanding is that it was easy in older versions, but how to do with newer versions?

Many thanks in advance!

 

[cmers]

I don't know the answer for the latest version, but I have experience with 8.x.

A way to deliver 8.x reports to users without Crystal Reports installed would be via the web. Your users view reports in a web browser using Crystal-supplied viewers (ActiveX, Java, or HTML). There are some tools available to assist with packaging the reports for the web, although they aren't required. We used ReCrystallize to get started (

http://www.recrystallize.com).

ReCrystallize generates an ASP page front-end for your reports. You can do the same thing manually, but it may require some research. Then you post the ASP pages on an IIS server where you've installed Crystal Developer (or Crystal Enterprise). When your user clicks the button to launch the report, they'll see the report in a very functional viewer (not as functional as having Crystal Reports installed, but fine for basic viewing and printing). If necessary, the viewer will auto-install in most browsers.

All you need to get started with this is a server running IIS and Crystal 8.x Developer Edition. Downside to this is licensing/scalability issues. 8.5 and later versions limit concurrent users via ASP pages because they want you to purchase Crystal Enterprise licenses. Crystal Enterprise works ok, but it was freaking expensive when we priced it a year ago.

Ken Hamady discusses this and some other 8.x options at

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

He also has another page that discusses the 9.x options.

Good luck!