The Evolution of Crystal Reports

Introduction
Mastering Crystal Reports 9
by Cate McCoy and Gord Maric
Sybex 2003

Crystal Reports is a Windows-based software tool used to retrieve stored data, organize it in a meaningful way, and present it as information used to solve business problems.

The company behind the software is Crystal Decisions, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. You can find them online at www.crystaldecisions.com. Their motto is "Access. Analyze. Report. Share." The people in the company are smart, vibrant, and anxious to showcase their product—and for good reason. Crystal Reports 9 is simply the best report-writing tool on the market.

How popular is this product? Over 11 million licenses have been shipped. The company has formed strategic alliances with both Microsoft and IBM, bundling their tool into the core software being delivered by both of these computer giants. Crystal Reports is the de facto report writer in use in today’s software world, and as a company, Crystal Decisions is positioned for continued growth in the niche market of business intelligence, or BI as it is often abbreviated.

Crystal Decisions also has a set of enterprise tools, called Crystal Enterprise and Report Application Server (RAS), that allow you take and distribute your reports to your organization. Whether you work in a small company or a very large company, you will be able to distribute reports with the Crystal Enterprise tool and associated applications.

Simply put, every organization that has stored data needs this software product to positively influence the never-ending processing loop of turning a company’s raw data into information and applied knowledge.

The Crystal Product Line

The Crystal Decisions product line consists of four major components, each addressing different tasks within the business intelligence market.

• Crystal Reports

• Report Application Server (RAS) and Crystal Enterprise

• Crystal Analysis

• Crystal Applications

Crystal Reports

Crystal Reports is the flagship software product in the Crystal Decisions line. This tool is used to connect to a data source, retrieve data, and build a report. Crystal Reports 9 helps you organize, sort, filter, summarize, and format information. The report can be saved in a variety of formats including Crystal’s RPT format, Microsoft Word and Excel formats, Adobe PDFs, and HTML, to name a few.

This book focuses on full coverage of Crystal Reports 9, including all its new features.

RAS and Crystal Enterprise

Crystal Enterprise is the piece of the product line that allows for widespread report distribution and security. Delivery of reports with RAS or Crystal Enterprise is done in a web environment with users accessing reports from their web browser. Existing reports are stored on a web server and accessed through a portal application, ePortfolio, provided by Crystal Decisions. In addition, Crystal Enterprise provides for real-time report generation and automatic generation of scheduled reports.

Crystal Reports ships with an entry-level version of Crystal Enterprise called the Report Application Server (RAS). We’ll cover RAS and Crystal Enterprise, explain the most recent product arrangements, and explain configuring, using, and developing applications.

Crystal Analysis

Crystal Analysis is a suite of products that addresses the analysis phase of problem solving. Analyzing data involves the ability to drill down from summarized data to detail data and the real-time slicing and dicing needed to answer questions about the business. The Crystal Analysis suite contains the following products:

• Crystal Analysis Professional

• Holos

• Crystal Analysis Server

• Crystal Analysis Developer

Crystal Applications

Crystal Applications are prepackaged applications built using Crystal Reports, Crystal Analysis, and Crystal Enterprise. We will see how we can build our own custom applications, using Crystal Reports and Crystal Enterprise, so that you can build similar applications specific to your business. However, you can also use these application to give you a jump. The set of prebuilt applications includes:

ePortfolio A web application included with RAS and Crystal Enterprise for deploying reports using a web browser. We will examine this in detail in this book.

Balanced Scorecard A key performance indicator measurement tool that provides company financial information as well as looking at setting objectives and measuring performance to provide a balanced view of the present and future performance of the company

Budgeting A budgeting application to streamline planning and budgeting. The budgeting application integrates with SAP and Oracle Financials.

Customer Profiling An analysis tool designed to help you better identify your customer. It can provide complementary products, cross-selling information, and statistics about your customers. Having more information about your customers will help you maintain them.

eTelecom A tool that consolidates the data from numerous communication channels to provide information about utilization of your PDX, email, remote access, and other communication infrastructure. It breaks down costs by employee so that you can analyze usage and capacity of the communication infrastructure.

Product Development

Crystal Reports is a teenager in human years but a mature adult in computer years, having been around for fourteen years. What began as a DOS-based integration into a small accounting package has evolved to a Windows-based system of world-class stature. Behind the scenes, the company has maintained the same high standards and focus on data reporting even while undergoing changes in ownership and name.

Over the past fourteen years, the positioning of the product has changed from an end-user tool to a power user and programmer’s tool. The goals for the tool are to meet both basic and advanced reporting needs for individuals and organizations.

Unlike most teenagers, Crystal Reports doesn’t complain about things it can’t control—like changing requirements. Instead, it adapts. The company is aggressive in keeping up and often outpaces the industry.

Crystal Decisions intends to stay indispensable in the business intelligence market. To do this, they are committed to staying on top of current technology trends, leveraging the ones that are widely adopted and using them to continually improve their product. The company vision includes a complete information infrastructure that allows any user to generate reports on any data source from any application for delivery to any device. A comprehensive and exciting vision!

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