What is the best way to handle this request?

[bessebo]

With every shipment of our product we also send along a certificate which details all of the serial numbers in the shipment. The users in Manufacturing print this certificate out of Business Objects Enterprise Release 2 using InfoView. We are currently on Service Pack 2.

I have a request from a Marketing person to make these certificates available to our customers. In other words, allow them access to either run the reports or access to a folder where the reports (certificates) are located. They also want to make this service something that we can charge our customers for.

I was thinking that maybe using CrystalReports.com but I don't have any experience using it. Another option was to possibly, on a nightly basis, based on the customer, schedule the certificates to run for any that have been shipped for that day and deposit them into a folder that the customer could have access to. This would probably require some type of bursting functionality.

I think the ideal solution would be for the customer to log onto a secure site and have a list of all certificates that have been run for them.

I was just hoping that maybe someone out there has had a similar request to let external customers either view or schedule reports that we typically leave to our internal users. Any suggestions or experiences would be very helpful.

Regards,
Bessebo

 

[IdoMillet]

I'm biased towards PUSHING the information to the customers, instead of expecting them to log on to some site and PULL the information.

A bursting solution can be used for either the PUSH as well as the PULL scenario.

At least one of the 3rd-party tools listed at

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

can do this (including dynamically creating/using different export folders for each customer.

- Ido

view, e-mail, export, burst, distribute, and schedule Crystal Reports.

http://www.MilletSoftware.com

 

[bessebo]

I hear you about Pushing vs Pulling but the requirement is a Pull method as the customer will want to access their data when they want it. I can potentially see the Push method for at least getting the reports into their respective folders that the external users can access via the webpage.

Regards,
Bessebo

 

[urbanhim]

I would seriously consider Crystalreports.com like you have mentioned. You can download a free trial, and also have ongoing support from Business Objects themselves, should you require it. It should also allow you to manage accounts, allowing you to allow or restric access as required. I have a free version of this, which I must confess, have not had much to do with, but I think for your purposes, you do not have a lot to lose. From what I have seen, it does appear to be intuitive, and user friendly.

You may have to purchase the full working "professional" version, but I highly recommend trying the free version first, see how you feel about it, ascertain whether its good enough for your needs. It might just be the perfect solution.

Best of luck with this though, please do let us know how you get on!



UrbanHim
Crystal XI Report Writer
London

[small]What's the best cure for a hangover?... Heavy drinking the night before!![/small]

 

[bessebo]

Thanks for your post. I went to CrystalReports.com but really didn't find all of the information that I really needed to make a determination whether or not this will work for us. I think the Professional Version will require a charge for every new account we add on. That could get expensive but I will look more into it. Do you know if CrystalReports.com is just a location that will house reports that we push to? Or can those accounts that access CrystalReports.com run reports? It is my guess that it is just a glorified FTP site that you put reports out onto, but, as I said, I'm not too familiar with it...

Regards,
Bessebo

 

[IdoMillet]

It's not just a "glorified FTP site" because it allows your users to VIEW the reports without needing to install any Crystal software on their own machines.

The main limitation is that they can only view the data saved with the report (they can't refresh the data).

Also, this approach still leaves you with the question of how to push the reports for each customer to CrystalReports.com.

- Ido

view, e-mail, export, burst, distribute, and schedule Crystal Reports.

http://www.MilletSoftware.com

 

[bessebo]

Good point. Thanks for your input..

 

[urbanhim]

It appears that Crystalreports.com will allow scheduling, so my presumption is you could schedule reports to run on say a daily basis, or even every hour, enabling your clients to see the latest instance of a report. However, I have just found out that licensing for Crystalreports.com professional is not cheap, its and I quote "Pricing is $299.50 USD per month for 10 users".

With this is mind, this might not be the best option!

That said, if you want to charge your customers, then they could pay for this themselves.

A fully functional professional crystalreports.com licence, should allow for complete flexibility, and you are able to connect to your datasources according to literature on their help pages, whether this will allow for client refresh of reports im not sure, but it appears to be the case. It might be worth you dropping them an email with your requirements and see if they can meet your needs:

services@ondemand.com

Do you have Business Objects XI or Crystal Reports Server? If so, would scheduling and automatic emailing of reports be sufficient for you? Im not sure clogging up poeple's inboxes is a solution, but might be something to consider!




UrbanHim
Crystal XI Report Writer
London

[small]What's the best cure for a hangover?... Heavy drinking the night before!![/small]

 

[bessebo]

Emailing report will not work. The customer wants to be able to access their reports at their discretion. That is the requirement at this point...