Crystal Reports
Crystal Reports is a popular general purpose report writing tool which has been around since the early 1990’s. With it you can connect to virtually any data source and produce a wide variety of reports. The latest version is Crystal Reports 2008. In this brand-new version Business Objects have done away with the usual 3 editions per version – standard, professional and developer – and have released a single edition that is the feature equivalent of the previous developer edition.
One of the appeals of Crystal Reports is its ease of use – you don’t need to be technical to create a report. Wizards are there to assist the novice while more experienced users drag and drop the required fields onto the report canvas. Behind the scenes, Crystal writes the necessary query which is then passed to the database when the report is run. As with all software, the more you know of the product, the more you can get out of it.
However, Crystal’s ease of use can also lead to problems. Suddenly, everyone is a report writer. For straight-forward reports that’s fine; the problem arises though when complex reports are required. Without a thorough understanding of database concepts, the inter-relation of tables and the types of join needed for certain reports, coupled with the need for efficiency (a long running report could be a sign of a poorly written one) and rigorous testing, end users can find themselves with a birds nest of a report that doesn’t give correct results – or worse, the results are assumed to be correct. The danger is that managers base decisions on such reports. It’s akin to dispensing with a professional wedding photographer while allowing a member of the congregation to take photos with a mobile phone! In either case the results will be disastrous.
A specialist report developer has the required understanding of databases and the required knowhow and tools to properly develop and test complex reports. I am of the opinion that end-users, much less managers, should not be writing reports – unless they are familiar with such concepts and their reports have been tested and proved to be correct.
Report Distribution
There is always more to reporting than meets the eye. Another area that organisations need to address is report distribution – how is a company to deliver the reports to those who need them? With Crystal Reports the onus is on the user to locate and run the required report. There’s no inherent security (anyone within the organisation with access to Crystal Reports and the required database permissions can obtain sensitive information), typically a copy of Crystal Reports is required on each PC and there is the danger that a report could be modified (intentionally or unintentionally) without the report author’s knowledge or approval.
To overcome these issues a sister product called Crystal Server exists (formerly Crystal Enterprise). This is a comprehensive report distribution system that takes the reports that are created with Crystal Reports and ‘publishes’ them to a secure reporting website within the company (an intranet).
Security can be established to ensure that only those with the appropriate permission to see a particular report do so, reports can be scheduled to run at a particular time (say overnight – ready for the next day) and the only software required by the report user is a standard internet browser; only report developers need a copy of Crystal Reports.
This is a much more efficient, secure and controlled way of distributing reports – so called enterprise-wide report delivery. This approach lends itself to requiring only a clutch of report developers (with the prerequisite report design skills and a solid understanding of the company’s database); everyone else in the organisation is a report consumer and only requires a browser (and the required permissions) to view a report. Despite viewing reports via a browser, users can still print or email reports or export them into Excel for further analysis.
Additional Information
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• Crystal Reports
• Crystal Server
