Having fought with Crystal Reports Server XI for a while now, I've installed it no less than four times. One of those times it inexplicably failed to work. I then unpacked the very same virtual machine and installed it into the same VM on which it failed to work at all after installation, and it worked. So before I even get into this article my first tip is "if it appears that it should work after your install, and it doesn't, wipe the system and try again."
Incidentally, this is also the official means of changing the system's host name. That's right! If you change the host name of the crystal server, then you need to reinstall. Oh, you don't need to, but the system installs all kinds of software (including Tomcat) in order to provide its base functionality. This may explain why the install takes approximately an hour longer than it should. Regardless, pre-tip #2 is make sure the host name is set before the install.
These frustrations and others provided the motivation to write this document. If you are like me, you are purchasing Crystal Reports Developer, which will come with a copy of Crystal Reports Server with a five-named-user license (not five concurrent users.) That's right, you may only have five users registered on the system. My purpose is primarily the scheduling of reports, so this is quite irrelevant to me. Only a couple of people will be connecting to the server directly to run reports.
Below is the short form, which should surprise no one:
- Install and update Windows (the only supported versions are Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003)
- Insert the install CD #1, run setup if you have disabled autoplay, and run the install. You can pick a language, which is up to you.
- Wait for a long, long time. Note that the estimated time remaining will hover around ten or fifteen minutes for approximately half an hour. This is probably faster on a real machine, it might only be ten minutes.
- If you haven't already, install IIS for the SMTP component. This may require the service pack files and the Windows 2000 install files. I have both unpacked on the network, where they belong. Configure SMTP to allow relay from localhost (which is the name we will use to contact the mail server, thus the same IP should show up as the source as well as the destination) and to do away with mail size limits, which default to 2MB. Crystal is not smart enough to compress reports before mailing, so you will likely have some gigantic reports if you use certain formats.
- Connect to the central management console on the crystal server. This will probably be on port 8080, load up
http://servername:8080/and log in as Administrator with no password. - Click on 'servers'. There are three job servers we have to care about; destination, program, and report. I believe the destination one is for crystal server, the program one for infoview, and I'm not sure about the report server. Regardless, on each of these servers you should configure the destination "SMTP". Values are fairly straightforward, but I will explain below anyhow.
This should be everything you need to do in order to provide a system that permits you to schedule reports for outgoing mail. There is quite a bit more to the entire process, of course.