[OT] Intranet advise from ya'll

Yahoo Archive
1
Rick,
We are currently doing what you are proposing, although not to the extent that you are looking for. We are simply using Internet Information Services (IIS) from Windows NT (version 3.0, I think). We also installed Crystal Enterprise on the same NT workstation. I have set one directory to "browse" (under IIS) so that anyone can type into their IE browser: http://nt/reports and they get a directory listing of all of our Crystal folders. I just checked, and you can also put other files in those folders and click on them (such as PDF) and it will open right in IE with the PDF viewer showing. If you click on an Excel or Word document, it will prompt you to open the file or save it. Clicking on a Crystal report brings up the Crystal viewer in the browser so that the end-user can view the report. It works really slick for us.

I don't think this will work for Report Builder reports, unless you do what Mike Podlin suggested and have the RB reports run nightly (or hourly??) and export them to HTML (which Mike can advise you how to do). Then a user could view the associated .htm file.


What else would you like to know?

Troy Funte
----- Original Message -----
From: Rick Gors
To: Vantage (E-mail)
Sent: Thursday, October 17, 2002 8:42 AM
Subject: [Vantage] [OT] Intranet advise from ya'll...


I want to put in an intranet.


I'm not really sure what that means to everyone else, but my requirements
are:

* Clients can access and see PDF documents (ISO-9000 procedures mostly).

* Clients can access and see Crystal Reports forms/reports (Vantage data).

* Clients can access and see Report Builder reports (Vantage data).

* Clients can view misc. other document types (newsletters, scanned
documents, etc.)

* Clients can do other cool stuff that I haven't thought of yet.

I would like to use a browser (IE) or Adobe Reader (both are available and
free) to view, interact, etc.

What program would you suggest to do all this? (Crystal Enterprise?
Frontpage?)



[Specs: NT 4 network, W2K (mostly) clients, W98 (a few) clients. Vantage
5.0]

Thanks a million for you responses!!

Rick Gors


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]


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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
2
I want to put in an intranet.


I'm not really sure what that means to everyone else, but my requirements
are:

* Clients can access and see PDF documents (ISO-9000 procedures mostly).

* Clients can access and see Crystal Reports forms/reports (Vantage data).

* Clients can access and see Report Builder reports (Vantage data).

* Clients can view misc. other document types (newsletters, scanned
documents, etc.)

* Clients can do other cool stuff that I haven't thought of yet.

I would like to use a browser (IE) or Adobe Reader (both are available and
free) to view, interact, etc.

What program would you suggest to do all this? (Crystal Enterprise?
Frontpage?)



[Specs: NT 4 network, W2K (mostly) clients, W98 (a few) clients. Vantage
5.0]

Thanks a million for you responses!!

Rick Gors


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
3
Rick:

Personally, something easy to use and easy for your users to use is
Microsoft SharePoint Server on Windows 2000 server. This can be accessed and
modified via FrontPage 2002 and it will make you look like an expert at
designing websites ;)

Very Easy and Cheap unless you actually buy the Microsoft SharePoint Server
Portal which is something entirely different (est. $2000).

I believe you buy FrontPage 2002 and you get the SharePoint Team Portal for
free, which is what we now use, and it works great for our needs, and my
users think its one of the best Intranet's they've seen yet (suckers).
Although, I have modified it quite extensively so I could mold it how I
wanted it for our specific needs.

But the SharePoint Server works as an awesome Intranet right out of the box.

A con of using this though, is it pretty much limits you to use FrontPage XP
and Windows 2000 (go figure with using Microsoft products).

Otherwise, if you know more things on the programming and website design
side, I'd recommend building your own in something like Macromedia
Dreamweaver MX (couple hundred bucks) using MySQL (free) and PHP (also
free).

Those are the cheap yet VERY effective options I've seen out there. I've
done quite an extensive amount of web and Flash design as a side profession
and personally I think FrontPage is a decent product for those who don't
want to do a lot of the programming work on a website (or don't know what
they are exactly doing). However, if you want more control, I would highly
recommend using Macromedia Dreamweaver MX with PHP or ASP and MySQL.

Jessee Holmes

-----Original Message-----
From: Rick Gors [mailto:rgors@...]
Sent: Thursday, October 17, 2002 7:43 AM
To: Vantage (E-mail)
Subject: [Vantage] [OT] Intranet advise from ya'll...


I want to put in an intranet.


I'm not really sure what that means to everyone else, but my requirements
are:

* Clients can access and see PDF documents (ISO-9000 procedures mostly).

* Clients can access and see Crystal Reports forms/reports (Vantage data).

* Clients can access and see Report Builder reports (Vantage data).

* Clients can view misc. other document types (newsletters, scanned
documents, etc.)

* Clients can do other cool stuff that I haven't thought of yet.

I would like to use a browser (IE) or Adobe Reader (both are available and
free) to view, interact, etc.

What program would you suggest to do all this? (Crystal Enterprise?
Frontpage?)



[Specs: NT 4 network, W2K (mostly) clients, W98 (a few) clients. Vantage
5.0]

Thanks a million for you responses!!

Rick Gors


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



Useful links for the Yahoo!Groups Vantage Board are: ( Note: You must have
already linked your email address to a yahoo id to enable access. )
(1) To access the Files Section of our Yahoo!Group for Report Builder and
Crystal Reports and other 'goodies', please goto:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/vantage/files/.
(2) To search through old msg's goto:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/vantage/messages
(3) To view links to Vendors that provide Vantage services goto:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/vantage/links

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
4
Our Intranet gets its screens and data edited/updated from all types of
sources and by different users:

We have users that maintain information from Excel and Publisher that they
save in HTML format on our Intranet.
Another user uses Frontpage to manage our QS-9000 documents.
I use Notepad and Wordpad for quick edits.
I have created Report Builder reports and Visual Basic programs that
create pages automatically on a daily basis (or other timed schedules).
Adobe Acrobat PDFwriter is setup to create PDF files on the Intranet
server which are then viewed from the users web browser.

The possibilities are endless.

Mike

P.S. I had problems with shop employees messing with IE by changing settings
and other stuff that I ended up writing my own web browser that only has
large "Home", "Forward", "Back", "Print" and "Exit" buttons so that it can
easily be used on a Touch screen setup. This really cut down on the traffic
hitting the firewall and Websense software since the shop stations don't
have a way now of entering a URL.


-----Original Message-----
From: Rick Gors [mailto:rgors@...]
Sent: Thursday, October 17, 2002 7:43 AM
To: Vantage (E-mail)
Subject: [Vantage] [OT] Intranet advise from ya'll...


I want to put in an intranet.


I'm not really sure what that means to everyone else, but my requirements
are:

* Clients can access and see PDF documents (ISO-9000 procedures mostly).

* Clients can access and see Crystal Reports forms/reports (Vantage data).

* Clients can access and see Report Builder reports (Vantage data).

* Clients can view misc. other document types (newsletters, scanned
documents, etc.)

* Clients can do other cool stuff that I haven't thought of yet.

I would like to use a browser (IE) or Adobe Reader (both are available and
free) to view, interact, etc.

What program would you suggest to do all this? (Crystal Enterprise?
Frontpage?)



[Specs: NT 4 network, W2K (mostly) clients, W98 (a few) clients. Vantage
5.0]

Thanks a million for you responses!!

Rick Gors


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



Useful links for the Yahoo!Groups Vantage Board are: ( Note: You must have
already linked your email address to a yahoo id to enable access. )
(1) To access the Files Section of our Yahoo!Group for Report Builder and
Crystal Reports and other 'goodies', please goto:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/vantage/files/.
(2) To search through old msg's goto:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/vantage/messages
(3) To view links to Vendors that provide Vantage services goto:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/vantage/links

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
5
Rick look into using Personal Web Server or IIS from Microsoft. PWS can run
on clients station, so each client could serve up its own content for others
in the company to see.

PDF forms: easy. make sure browsers have the acrobat plug in.

Crystal can also serve up web content.

I remember an interesting thread, started by Michael Podlin on 1-31-01.
Here is a copy:

Just for fun I took and wrote a simple report builder report in a generic
text format and included HTML tags in the report. When ran and printed to a
file "TEST.HTM" I had an instant web document for the company intranet. Has
anybody else tried this? I figure this is just another way of distributing
reports that will also help save a few trees too.

I am the only one in our company supplying our intranet with content. So
ours mostly has IT related content like software updates, bug fixes, FAQ's
and how-to's.

I am currently testing a pretty cool search engine which indexes all of our
AutoCAD dwg's title blocks and thumbnails all the changed and new DWG's
overnight. The lusers are then able to search for any keywords in a google
like interface which returns the results complete with thumbnail.


Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: Rick Gors [mailto:rgors@...]
Sent: Thursday, October 17, 2002 8:43 AM
To: Vantage (E-mail)
Subject: [Vantage] [OT] Intranet advise from ya'll...


I want to put in an intranet.


I'm not really sure what that means to everyone else, but my requirements
are:

* Clients can access and see PDF documents (ISO-9000 procedures mostly).

* Clients can access and see Crystal Reports forms/reports (Vantage data).

* Clients can access and see Report Builder reports (Vantage data).

* Clients can view misc. other document types (newsletters, scanned
documents, etc.)

* Clients can do other cool stuff that I haven't thought of yet.

I would like to use a browser (IE) or Adobe Reader (both are available and
free) to view, interact, etc.

What program would you suggest to do all this? (Crystal Enterprise?
Frontpage?)



[Specs: NT 4 network, W2K (mostly) clients, W98 (a few) clients. Vantage
5.0]

Thanks a million for you responses!!

Rick Gors


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



Useful links for the Yahoo!Groups Vantage Board are: ( Note: You must have
already linked your email address to a yahoo id to enable access. )
(1) To access the Files Section of our Yahoo!Group for Report Builder and
Crystal Reports and other 'goodies', please goto:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/vantage/files/.
(2) To search through old msg's goto:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/vantage/messages
(3) To view links to Vendors that provide Vantage services goto:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/vantage/links

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/