I have been lucky enough to have worked with Crystal Reports for over 15 years. In those years, the Crystal Reports family of offerings has grown from simple reporting tool bundled with VB 3 (CR 2.0) to a suite of integrated reporting solutions. Over a million developers have enhanced their applications using the Crystal Reports. Geared for small businesses and midsize companies, Crystal Reports solutions provide developers with everything they need to embed professional reporting in their applications and deploy reports to any number of users, anywhere.
Flexible products, deployment and licensing offerings (see Licensing section for more details) help developers meet nearly any development need. An embeddable run-time engine and viewer is available for both Java and .NET applications. Deployment of applications that embed Crystal Reports is designed to be easy and intuitive; Java developers work with familiar JAR files, while .NET developers have the choice of MSI, MSM or ClickOnce deployments. Both thick-client and Web applications are supported for both Java and .NET. The below table describes some of the more important features and benefits available to developers looking to embed Crystal Reports in their reporting projects.
Comparison of Crystal Reports Features Across Products
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~Up to five named users and twenty un-named concurrent users
*Internal deployment refers to reports that are consumed by employees of contractors within an organization
^External deployment includes exposing an application to non-employees and embedding in a commercial Web application
Licensing
For details regarding licensing, see the following resources:
Announcing Crystal Reports Developer Advantage runtime license
Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .Net Licensing Information (Crystal Reports bundle - .NET 2002, .NET 2003, .NET 2005, .NET 2008)
Crystal Reports XI Release 2 Component Licensing Explained
If none of the above resources help, contact sales in your region.
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