In general, there are two communities of Crystal Reports users within most organizations: report designers and report consumers. The report designer group is usually smaller in number. These individuals are focused on creating the actual report content, whereas the report consumer group consists of the end organizational audience viewing the reports. Thus, these are distinctively different roles, with the smaller group of designers supporting the greater group of viewers. Although this book is focused more on providing the report designers with the information and skills required to create reports, it is also very important to consider the needs of the report consumer group and how they will be using the end reports. Depending on your situation, you might be one of a number of Crystal Report designers within a large organization or an individual report designer in a small company. In any case, Crystal Reports is a graphical report design application that needs to be installed locally on your workstation in order to create reports. If you're a member of a large organization, you might have a supporting Information Technology group who will perform the installation of Crystal Reports for you. Regardless, Crystal Reports can be installed on a local PC residing on a corporate network in very much the same manner as a home PC or workstation. In this aspect, installing Crystal Reports is much like installing other popular PC applications, such as Microsoft's Word and Excel, your preferred Web browser, and Adobe's Acrobat Reader. The consumers of information and reports created by Crystal Reports includes a wide range of individuals and corporate professionals. For example, common users of Crystal Reports include corporate business personnel in departments such as finance, human resources, and sales for operational reporting purposes, organizational performance measurement, and sales analysis. In addition to the business community demands, IT groups often have specific development requirements to embed reporting capabilities into custom applications and corporate Web pages. Not only do corporate personnel use Crystal Reports, but it is also a highly used application for individuals who require an easy-to-use and intuitive tool for creating attractive and meaningful reports.
During the report design phase, it is common for reports to be processed on the report designer's local workstation, which in turn requires resources on the local workstation. Before installing Crystal Reports on your local PC, you should verify and properly configure certain system settings, such as
Reviewing the System Requirements for Crystal Reports 9As with previous releases, multiple editions of the Crystal Reports 9 application are available from Crystal Decisions. Specifically, there are four distinct editions of Crystal Reports 9:
Nearly all of the exercises in this book can be completed using any of these editions. However, the developer-focused exercises covered in the later hours might require either the Developer or Advanced Editions though these topics can still be reviewed and include valuable information on advanced report design concepts. The edition that best serves your needs is dependent on your specific reporting and technical requirements. For example, for users who only need to access data sources to create simple reports via the Crystal Reports designer, the Standard or Professional editions will most likely meet their requirements. However, report designers or application developers who require the added ability to embed reporting functionality within custom applications (such as applications created with the Visual Basic, .NET, and Java programming languages) will require either the Developer or Advanced Editions of Crystal Reports.
The key minimum system requirements are necessary to ensure that the Crystal Reports application has sufficient local resources available on the report designer's workstation. Regardless of which edition of Crystal Reports 9 you will be installing, the minimum system requirements for a local workstation installation (from CD-ROM) are as follows:
If you plan to perform a network installation of Crystal Reports 9, the preceding minimum requirements should be adjusted as follows:
|