Report Deployment - Newbie Question

[Former Member]

I'm evaluating CR 2008, and the report design features look great. But there's absolutely no information about how reports are deployed to users. It's like some kind of exclusive club that I obviously don't belong to.

Background: I'm a QuickBooks consultant reviewing CR for a client (a 2-person business) who has reporting needs that are beyond the capabilities of QuickBooks. I've obtained the ODBC driver for QB and set up the CR 2008 trial. I've managed to create a couple of fairly interesting reports using QB data.

OK, so here's the stupid question: How do I get these reports to the users? It seems like I have to execute the report and save it (with the data) from within the designer. Is that right? If so, it would mean that the user has to go into the designer every time they want to refresh the data, which doesn't make sense to me. I know that applications can be developed using CR as the reporting engine, but why should I have to develop an application just so my users can view reports with the latest data from QuickBooks?

Bottom line: How can my users view reports with the latest data from QuickBooks without going into the designer? What all do we need to buy, download, or otherwise acquire to make this work?

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hello,

You have several way to deploy crystal reports. It depends from technology with which you are using it. however, You can publish it into business objects enterprise infoview. From this single point window all the users can run/view the reports.

[Former Member]

OK, after a little more digging, I downloaded the free Crystal Reports Viewer. This is great for viewing static reports. Don't know why it isn't included with the CR trial download. Anyway, I set up a starter account and figured out how to upload reports and schedule them to be refreshed automatically.