Scheduling

Crystal Enterprise 8.5 now features advanced scheduling tasks and enhancements, which include the ability to have an instance delivered to a specific location, and the ability to link a scheduling task with an event. The system also offers greater control over object schedules as well (for example, jobs can be paused). Finally, reports can be scheduled to output in a specific format (for example, RPT format, Word, PDF, and so on).

Schedule to destination

Crystal Enterprise 8.5 introduces the ability to deliver a report to a particular external location. Supported output destinations include: direct to printer, file system (disk destination), email (via SMTP), and FTP servers.

Schedule to format

Reports can now be automatically output to other formats at schedule-time (in version 8.0, all conversions were done on demand). Supported formats include: RPT, Excel, Word, PDF, RTF, and plain text.

Event-based scheduling

Designed to complement the time-based scheduling mechanisms in version 8.0, event-based scheduling allows tight linkages between Crystal Enterprise processes and related processes in other back-end systems. Crystal Enterprise 8.5 supports both file-based events (triggers based on a physical file being written), schedule-based events (triggers based on another scheduled report's completion), and custom events (triggers fired from within the CMC, or by other applications through actual code). Events can be used to start the processing of a particular job and/or signal when it is complete.

Job Server control

To support geographically disparate deployments or special processing requirements, Crystal Enterprise 8.5 allows administrators to assign particular objects to specific processing servers (Job Servers).

Related topics

What's New in Crystal Enterprise