Crystal Report Services question

Catherine Han · July 2016

Does anyone knows companys who provide crystal report for custumer with better rate and better services?

Any suggestions?

Chester Bammel · July 2016

Hello Catherine,

There are a number of companies or individuals
out there who can provide excellent work. But here are the
issues. First, they have to understand the data structure of
your database and what it is designed to do. They have to
know which tables contain which data and how the tables relate to
each other. Secondly, in order to do this, and in order to be
able to write and test the report, they need to have access to your
data. This can be done in a couple of ways. They can be
granted VPN access to your database where they can connect
directly. This will obviously require a level of trust and an
agreement between the two parties for security purposes. You
can also provide a virtual connection through a remote login, such
as a remote desktop connection. This is not quite as handy
for the developer, but is functional. In that case, Crystal
must be installed on the system they are remoting into.

There would be a substantial time necessary
for them to get in and learn your system to develop reports from
scratch. Now, if all you needed was a simple tweak – moving
fields, adding a field, adding a calculation, then this would not
be too difficult.

I do speak from experience. I have over
13 years experience at developing Crystal Reports. I have
served a number of clients at the same time in my previous
job. I have also done some private consulting work as you
described. In those cases, the clients understood the time it
would take to get familiar with their systems and were willing to
allow for that.

So, it boils down to what you are willing to
do. Yes, RE’s support may be costly, but they do know the
system and don’t have that learning curve and it saves you time and
money there. But if you are willing to allow someone the time
to learn your system, then there could be a potential savings
there.

I hope this little bit of advice has been of
some help.

Best regards,

Chester

Chester Bammel

Business
Analyst

IT Enterprise
Services

Division of
Information Technology

Sam
Houston State University

Box
2397 Huntsville, TX 77341

Office - (936) 294-2351

Catherine Han · July 2016

Hi Chester:

Thank you for your quick response. I would like to know how long normally you will take to learn client's system?

Thanks!

Catherine

Chester Bammel · July 2016

It’s obviously ongoing and you are
continuously learning. But it will likely take a day to learn
your way around.

One good way to help the process along is to
provide other functioning reports to review. By disassembling
those reports and seeing how they are built, that helps the
developer to understand the structure of the tables in a more
practical way. It really depends upon how complex everything
is.