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October 30, 2002

The Latest Report

Crystal Reports set to maintain popularity

by David McAmis

Continued from Page 1

Another exciting development is the integration of a piece of technology from Crystal Enterprise (another Crystal Decisions product) called the Reporting Application Server (RAS). Developers can use it to control the report's content when integrating it into their applications, or can even let users create reports from scratch without any developer intervention.

This option is available with the Advanced edition of Crystal Reports, and while the price may be a deterrent, you can use the RAS to create complex reporting applications that may save on report development time.

To The Enterprise

With so much emphasis on creating enterprise-level applications, it was only fitting that Crystal call its report distribution framework Crystal Enterprise. Crystal Enterprise is a scalable, platform-independent report distribution, scheduling, and processing engine. The upcoming version 9.0 release can be used in conjunction with Crystal Reports 9.0 to provide the back-end muscle to create applications that can support hundreds of users for both real-time and scheduled reports with a clustered, multiserver architecture that can span Windows, Linux, and Unix platforms.

In addition to providing a scalable, multitier back end for reporting applications, Crystal Enterprise has its own security layer, which can use Windows NT authentication, LDAP, and so on. It also has and internal structures, such as folders, objects, and rights. You can use the scheduling engine and distribution capabilities to build complex reporting applications without having to reinvent a solutions architecture just for reporting.

The clustering within Crystal Enterprise ensures that large jobs are run regardless of server outages, and the distributed architecture means that you can add multiple servers to share the processing workload, including servers tasked specifically to run scheduled reports, process on-demand requests, and so on.

It's Tops

For feature-rich, presentation-quality reporting, Crystal Reports 9.0 is the hands-down winner in its category, with enough new and enhanced features to make both users and developers happy.

Aside from some teething problems with the user interface for some of the new features that have been introduced with this release, the product stands well on its own as a report writer or as part of a larger implementation. The product is available in Standard, Professional, Developer, and Advanced editions. (See the Crystal Decisions Web site for a description of what's included in each.) With a price tag starting from around $200, it's affordable for small departments as well as for larger implementations.

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With an emphasis on platform-agnostic development and the back-end muscle to create applications that can scale from 100 to 100,000 users, Crystal Reports 9.0 might be the only reporting tool you'll need.

David McAmis [dmcamis@hotmail.com] is an IT consultant, journalist, and expert in business intelligence.