What is Evangelism? What is Crystal Reports for Eclipse?

Today I’m in Dallas Texas at the Eclipse Member Meetings. I’ll be here for  two days and if the second day is as good as the first I’ll feel that the time  away from home was worth it. I should be careful what I say since I missed my  daughter starting to crawl yesterday.

This afternoon I attended the    Eclipse Marketing Symposium  . One highlight for me was the round table they had  on evangelism and viral marketing. Since evangelism is a new role for me I was  especially interested. Someone asked,   Why do we have evangelists  ? The answer  quickly came,   Religion  . After everyone chuckled the panelist began to explain  that evangelists are around because technical people are tired of marketing.  Evangelists are there to talk technical to technical people. Evangelist should  explain what the product is and help users quickly adopt and easily evaluate the  product.

So in that spirit here’s my quick explanation of what Crystal  Reports for Eclipse is:

1. Crystal Reports for Eclipse is a Report Design tool. – Crystal Reports for  Eclipse is an Eclipse plug-in that allows users to create and edit Crystal  Reports files. Crystal Report files allow developers to extract the presentation  layer of their application from business logic, thus allowing you to modify  reports without changing your code.
2. Crystal Reports for Eclipse bundles a Runtime Engine –  Crystal Reports for  Eclipse bundles a 100% Java runtime engine. This engine allows developers to run  crystal reports in their java web or rich client applications.
3. Crystal Report for Eclipse is a Development Tool – Crystal Reports for  Eclipse contains tooling that makes it easier than ever before to integrate  reports in to your applications. This tooling was designed specifically for  applications developers. It contains tools that inspect your reports and  generate the code needed to embed them in your application.

The three points abover are very simplistic but hopefully this helps  potential users understand what exactly the product is.

For more on  Crystal Reports for Eclipse go to http://diamond.businessobjects.com/eclipse 

If any one has any feedback on what they think an Evangelist should be  doing, I would love to hear from you.

Until next time,
Rob