Crystal Reports is an SAP software product. It is the world's leading reporting tool — powerful and flexible. Using this tool, Escape Technology has designed highly formatted, interactive reports that can be run from within Escape Online.
Depending on your needs, you may or may not have to purchase Crystal Reports. To give you an idea of what you need to buy (and train for), review the following scenarios:
There are basically three types of reports: standard, custom and stand-alone. The following explains each type.
We have a fully developed set of standard reports. These reports are integrated with Escape Online. They can be run from within a record (a snapshot) and/or from the Reports activity.
Most counties and districts should find that these reports fulfill all of their reporting needs.
We recognize that you may need some custom reports. We can develop them for you, or you can have your staff develop them.
If you choose to have us develop the reports, our standard consulting fees and scheduling practices apply.
If you choose to have your staff develop them, we will provide all our Crystal Reports files, stored procedures and functions for use in your reports. You can copy these to your custom report directory and use them as templates. We even developed report standards that you can use so that all of your reports have the same look and feel.
Some of the things to keep in mind if you choose to develop your own reports are the training and maintenance required.
Crystal Reports is a complex program that cannot be picked up and lightly used. Your staff will have to attend training sessions to be able to use this product effectively. They will also have to understand database structure, stored procedures and functions to create complex reports.
Custom reports require maintenance. Escape Online is a growing product. Database updates will occur. These updates could affect the reports you have developed. Your staff will be responsible for updating your custom reports when there are updates to Escape Online.
Stand-alone reports are custom reports that are run from Crystal Reports as opposed to Escape Online. Some customers may want to run reports directly from Crystal, taking advantage of the raw SQL data for data warehousing and in-depth analysis.
One of the advantages of the stand-alone method is that you are not restricted by the report viewer. You can use Crystal to export data to a variety of formats. Once again, we can develop these reports for you or you can develop them.
These reports would require licenses from SAP for every user running the stand-alone report. In addition, if the stand-alone reports are created in-house, your staff will be responsible for updating the reports when there are updates to Escape Online.
Let's review some of the considerations that we've already discussed along with a few additional points you should consider: