I'm an ICT & Business student, currently doing an internship in a quite big company. My assignment is to find a way to deliver Management Reports to Line Managers.
The company is using SAP (Employee data such as name, department, contract start-end date etc. can be found there).
The managers don’t have SAP accounts therefore they can’t login to SAP. I need to find a way to retrieve the data from SAP, create custom reports and deliver them to the managers (via mail or website where the reports will be stored).
Can Crystal Reports do that? Or do I need additional tools?
As far as I know in order to send reports to recipients you need to have BO license for each recipient.
Cheaper (even free) alternative will be to use one of the 3rd party tools available on the market. Groff Automation (http://www.groffautomation.com/) has a free scheduler, which can be used to run and send reports by e-mail. It is pretty basic , but will do the job.
Another free option is the free license from R-Tag (www.r-tag.com), free license is available from this link: http://www.r-tag.com/Pages/FreeCrystalReportsViewer.aspx
This one has more options , but the free license is just for the viewer. If you want to schedule the reports you need to purchase their scheduler license.
If you are willing to purchase a license for a scheduler you can check also the other available options from this link:
http://kenhamady.com/cru/comparisons/desktop-scheduling-engines
It contains the 2 products mentioned above + some more.
Related
I developed an Office Word add-in that I'd like to make available to organizations as well as single users. I understand that the AppSource will only grant licenses to single users, and that if I want to distribute to organizations I must create my own licensing and accounting backend[1] and have an IT professional at the purchasing organization run a centralized deployment of the add-in.
My question deals with finding the best practice to offer the app on AppSource such that both an single user and an enterprise client can deploy the app straight from AppSource.
The rub is that I'm not willing to make my app free, which is a requirement for Centralized Deployment[3]:
You may only add free add-ins from AppSource; adding paid add-ins isn't currently supported.
So, I'm thinking that I can't multipurpose my add-in on the AppSource and instead either:
Provide two add-in products in app source. One that does token checks only, and another that does user identity checks only. The second one being "free" on AppSource and Centralized Deployment friendly.
Only provide a token-based app in AppSource, and create a secondary manifest that I provide to organizational purchasers.
Both solutions are clunky and my aim to simplify the code base. I'm basically wondering what is the standard(best) practice(s) to provide an AppSource add-in that can serve both individual and organizational users?
Personally I'd make the add-in free and use your own licensing backend to allow users to activate the functionality. This is common practice for other addins
Thanks
Phil
Is there any way to automatically purchase new licenses for VSTS users? There's API's for adding users and adding entitlements, but I can't find anything for buying new licenses.
There isn’t he API to buy the new license, you can change another’s’ access level to Stakeholder and change the new added user’s access level to Basic if someone do not need the basic access level.
User Entitlements - Update User Entitlement
On the other hand, you just need to add user to VSTS who has the Visual Studio Enterprise subscription.
I scanned through the full list of APIs supported by Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and Team Foundation Services (TFS) documented Here. AFAIk, there is no API exposed to automatically purchase new express/basic licenses for VSTS users.
I concur with raterus. Can you please elaborate on your use case and we can attempt to prescribe an alternate solution.
The use case: Azure DevOps (ADO) bills you directly for reserved license space. I.e. I can buy space for 2000 basic licenses within an ADO-organization and even if no one is active (utilizing a basic license) my company gets billed for the 2000 inactive users per month. So as a ADO admin you buy a little license space extra for new users that join, when you run out of it you buy a little extra space again.
I am currently in the process where we slowly ramp up to approximately 4000+ ADO users over a couple of years. People are allowed to join the ADO-org through AD group membership, the moment they become active they take a basic license (if there is licensespace) otherwise they get assigned a stakeholder license. Which you have to correct by hand, mostly after user is baffled as they can't clone the git repo after having carefully followed the readme.
All in all a cumbersome manual environment, please allow me to automate the user management. Or change the license model to not bill unusued license space, then I can set the cap to 4000 and I am fine.
What is possible
detecting low license space, with a cronned pipeline we can send an alert to remediate
adding removing users and licenses, typically run at the last day of the month to remove inactive users (for them invisible as they get the license back once they return through their AD group membership)
I have a couple of small offline softwares that I wrote using Itext Sharp. The software uses IText Sharp to manipulate PDFs. I saw that Itext licensing is AGPL and any work based on that should also be AGPL (I should include source code along with the application and user can modify and redistribute)
My question is can I sell these softwares with source codes bundled with them?
The moment you sell software that is licensed under the AGPL in the context of proprietary, closed source software, you are in violation with the AGPL. If you use iText "free of charge", you need to follow the rules of the AGPL as described in this blog post: How do I make sure my software complies with AGPL: How can I use iText for free?
If you make your own source code open source, you can for instance charge for creating a distribution of your open source software (including the source of iText) on a CD or a DVD (but who still uses CDs and DVDs?), but you can't charge for the IP of iText. You also can't distribute the source code only to people who pay. That would be discriminating (and discrimination goes against the core values of open source).
This doesn't mean you can't make any money. The owner of the iText software, iText Group, offers two options that allow you to make money with your software:
You can purchase a commercial license for your use of iText. If your product is an offline product that people install on their own machine, you will have to buy a Desktop OEM license and pay a small fee for every copy you sell. Note that you need to buy an OEM pack of several licenses in advance. You can't buy OEM licenses one at a time. You need to be sure that you will sell sufficient copies.
You submit your products for evaluation to iText Group, and you ask iText Group to sell your product. For every copy of your software that is sold by iText Group, you will receive money. If you don't have any sales people, nor any marketing budget, this option is to be preferred. iText Group has offices in the US, Europe, and Asia. iText is present at events all over the world. This is an ideal way for you as a developer to have your product promoted world-wide. See iText Creates Revenue Sharing Opportunities for Development Community
See also Monetizing open-source projects, which is a slide-deck that explains how open source licenses work, and how you can make money using open source. You will also notice some legal documents that show that the AGPL can be upheld in court (we won a law suit against a developer who knowingly violated the AGPL).
I'm new to Crystal Reports 2011. Years ago, I used a report writer that had a report definition GUI. It also had a report viewer exe. I was able to distribute these report definition files and the viewer was able to access data in REAL-TIME. An ODBC connection was required for each user but it was simple to set-up given that I only have 5 users. Life was good. It was a simple solution. What's more it was cheap.
Is this possible with Crsytal Reports 2011 without purchasing the server product? I downloaded crystal viewer but I was surprised to find out that this required me to embed the data within the report (no real-time access). It appears I have 2 options. Purchase Crystal Report Server or do some custom development in .net. Both opinions appear to be overkill for my needs.
What are my options? Does SAP have a solution for small companies that don't want to purchase Crystal Server?
Thanks,
Wayne
I am no Crystal licensing expert, but maybe this will help.
Unless they have changed the licensing from Crystal 2008, then I think you are out of luck. As I recall, there are only two ways to share reports created with the desktop products (2008 or 2011) - you can purchase the server, or purchase a separate desktop license for each user.
The Crystal bundled with Visual Studio has most of the features, and it allows you to share reports on a web site. The server runtime limited to three simultaneous users, so it's not great for a high volume situation.
I would like to write a plug-in that will allow a custom written CRM to read and write to their local Outlook client. I know that this poses a security concern. But, my clients are asking that their CRM "be connected" to Outlook. They would like to be able to do the following:
A) When a contact sends them an email (reply or free standing email), they'd like the details of this email to go INTO the CRM. Yep. They would like me to save the body, time and date it was sent, etc.
B) They want to be able to send new emails (or replies to existing emails) from within the CRM itself. Basically, "a form that looks like Outlook's send/reply email form".
C) Want the ability to search for contacts and the related emails with a search for tags/keywords facility. (i.e. if a product name or code appears in an email then they want the email returned in the search).
D) Having performed a search of many contacts, they will want to prepare a mailer and shoot out some sort of email announcement to their qualified leads. This could be 50, 100, or more persons. So its got to be able to allow bulk mailing.
E) Given a list of new prospects, that arent currently contacts in the CRM, they will want to do the same and if they get replies from this mailer to the prospects, the will want the replies to be saved in the DB and contacts be inserted into the DB.
F) They would like to be able to utilize the calendar and task list facilities of Outlook from the CRM, as well.
More or less, they want this pretty basic (as it is today) CRM that I created to integrate with Outlook and have it do so seamlessly as if it was an add-on to the CRM. A plug-in is what I am thinking...
But, I dont know where to begin. My environment is Windows XP/Vista and is going to be ASP.NET and I am going to use the VB.NET language to accomplish this. What do I need? Are there resources out there that can describe how to build a plug-in to Outlook as I have been asked to? This is not Exchange, none of the clients use exchange (not so far). They all run Outlook. Mostly 2003. Most clients are XP right now but some are upgrading to Vista.
For some reason I cant seem to wrap my head around this. I think the whole security issue is thwarting my ability to see past what is probably a simple thing. The client doesnt want to be prompted by any security messages asking them if they are sure they want to send 382 emails to their contacts. Not once and certainly not 382 times.
Where do I begin? I've searched the internet for similar but mainly what I found are already-written products and I've got to write this from scratch.
I was part of the team that created the original Outlook Plug-In for Frankley Covey time management tools. It was quite an adventure!
The first thing I would do is make your client pick a version of Outlook, and stick with it. DO NOT let the client add support for additional Outlook versions, unless they are willing to pay for it, and willing to have the delivery time pushed back to a reasonable date.
The team I was with swore by the Slipstick website. There are several solutions to the Outlook security prompts in there.
If you can, talk to Microsoft and see if they can get you the object model for the specific version of Outlook you will be working with. We had this model printed on a large scale color printer and put it on a large wall. IIRC, it was something like 7'x5' object map. This helped tons.
You might end up creating specific classifications/namespaces for your Outlook code. It's been a while, but I remember something about a dot notation like .Email, .Task, and several others. I had to create a couple new dot namespaces for the Outlook Task object.
As razorfish noted, look up the new Visual Studio For Office Tools. This has made some stuff a lot easier.
Talk to your client and find out if they will need to connect to Exchange servers. There were two distinct ways of building Plug-ins. One mode only worked with Outlook itself, while the other talked with Exchange. This is very important to your development efforts. The models are VERY different and will cost you extra time if you pick the wrong one.
EDIT: There are a couple books that were helpful with this. The books are for Outlook 2000, so you might want to see if there are updated versions.
Building Applications with Microsoft Outlook 2000 Technical Reference
Building Applications using Outlook 2000, CDO, Exchange, and Visual Basic
Both have a lot of information on how to do deep integrations with Outlook.
You should take a look at the Visual Studio for Office Tools. You can easily create add-ins for Outlook, Word, Excel ... pretty much the entire Microsoft Office family of products.
You can also take a look at Add-In Express, but I didn't have much luck with their controls, and the VSTO for 2008 is extremely easy to use.
Check out Kayxo Insight. It's a framework for creating the kind of solution you are describing.
Check out www.softomate.com they offer plugins and integration solutions for various projects.