Taking advantage of the increasingly frustrating fact that the OEM licenses of Crystal Reports have been traditionally sold as a separately priced option on the Dynamics GP price list. The core Dynamics GP purchase does not include any Crystal Reports licenses. And although unconfirmed it appears that from this summer that Crystal will be taken off the Dynamics GP price list.
It is possible to purchase Crystal Reports in any number of ways, but it should be possible to avoid any extra cost by utilising this add-on and to run Crystal Reports directly from GP.
GP Reports Viewer is the way to truly integrate Crystal Reports into Dynamics GP, users can organize and launch reports with their Dynamics GP login, and run the same Crystal report no matter what GP company they are logged into - no need to make any changes or save multiple versions of reports.
It therefore leads to multiple benefits for the user such as being able to run Crystal Reports directly from Dynamics GP taking advantage of using GP security. It also offers users the chance to organize their Crystal Reports into Batches and run them all at once. Reports can be run from Flex Solutions Reports Viewer screen or from any window in GP - via the Print Button or Extras menu. The simplicity of the application is such that your report automatically uses data from the GP company you are in, ensuring the user is in control.
There is also the feature of auto detection of report parameters and the ability to pass parameters directly into reports from GP windows. For the more experience GP user there is also the ability to customise it so that you can assign built-in GP lookups to parameters or easily create additional lookups as needed.
GP Reports Viewer includes a number of pre-installed lookups for some frequently used parameters on reports, such as Customer ID, Vendor ID or Inventory Item Number. If you have one of these as a parameter on your Crystal Report, you can simply pick it from the list of lookups when setting up reports in GP Reports Viewer. But what if your report uses a parameter that is not available or is a static parameter, like months of the year? To handle this you can create an unlimited number of custom lookups in GP Reports Viewer.
The options simply are endless with GP Reports Viewer and the cost saving on the Crystal Reports OEM licence will be a smart ROI for your organisation.
