I work for an animal shelter whose database front-end is meshed with Crystal Reports. We’re currently using Crystal Reports 7, and need to upgrade. Problem is, there’s a bajillion different versions of Crystal Reports out there, and I don’t know how to tell them apart.
Can someone explain the different capabilities of standard, professional, and developer’s editions? Can anyone help me figure out whether a small organization (20 computers running on a Windows Small Business network) would need a particular one of these versions?
That database wouldn’t happen to be Raiser’s Edge, would it? That’s what we use, and, if it is, I think I can point you to someone who knows.
Unfortunately, I don’t have reasons to use Crystal Reports here (I work for a university fundraising office), although co-workers do, and quite like it. AFAIK, we’ve always just used the standard reports here, and get along fine with them.
No–we use a homebrew database for donation tracking. Our shelter management software is called Chameleon.
In looking around further, I think I may have found a sideways answer to my problem: the upgrade to professional costs less than the full version of standard, and there’s no upgrade to standard, AFAIK, so we’ll probably do the professional upgrade.
I suppose the only concern that might stop you from going to “professional” might be ease of use, but my co-workers which use Crystal haven’t had too many difficulties with using it. I doubt it would be a serious problem.
501(c)(3), actually :). And yeah, I checked that a month or so ago; Business Options does very limited donations, AFAICT. (I think it was donations only to schools or something).
Incidentally, if there are any other nonprofits out there looking for software donations, your best starting point is www.techsoup.org; our organization has gotten literally thousands of dollars worth of software from them, paying a service fee of around $17.50 a pop for programs worth $400 and up. They were the first place I checked when trying to find Crystal Reports on the cheap.
