How to Automatically Distribute ViewPoint Reports

If you are in the construction industry, chances are that your business uses ViewPoint Software for Accounting, ERP, Project Management and/or Field Management.
One of many strengths that ViewPoint Software offers is that it comes with powerful precanned reports for invoicing, purchase orders, project management, financials and more.

Since ViewPoint plays a central role in most constructions companies’ infrastructure,  most of them have a large number of users and project managers that need access to reports inside the software. In order to make these reports accessible, the ViewPoint administrator must either provide access to ViewPoint to all the users, which is not economical, or manually run reports and send them to the users. This is both time consuming and prone to human errors.

remiCrystal To The Rescue

The ideal solution to this problem is to automate ViewPoint Reports and this is where remiCrystal comes in. Since ViewPoint reports are Crystal Reports, and the backend database is a Microsoft SQL Server database, our software can be used to automatically distribute ViewPoint Crystal Reports to your users and project managers automatically, saving you time and thousands of dollars.

Here is how:

Create An ODBC DSN To The ViewPoint Database

Open the 32-bit ODBC Data Source Administrator by going to C:\WINDOWS\SYSWOW64\odbc32.exe (on a 64-bit operating system) or C:\WINDOWS\System32\odbc32.exe (on a 32-bit operating system) and select the System DSN tab.

1. Click “Add” and select the “SQL Server” or “SQL Server Native Client” ODBC driver
2. Give the DSN a name and specify the ViewPoint database server name.
3. Hit Next and, if your ViewPoint requires SQL Server authentication, provide the username and password, otherwise hit next again.
4. Select your ViewPoint database from the dropdown and hit Next
5. Hit next and leave the default settings as is.
6. Finally, test the connection and hit OK to save it.

Create a remiCrystal Task to use Data From ViewPoint

Open remiCrystal and select “Create External-Data Task” :

1. Under the “External Data” tab, select the DSN that you created in Step 1 and specify a username and password is necessary
2. Hit the Connect button to build the query that will be used to pull in data from your ViewPoint database into remiCrystal
3. Validate the query and preview the results of your query

Add The ViewPoint Reports That You Would Like To Automatically Distribute

Hit the Crystal Report button under the “Reports & Actions” tab and browse to select one or more of your ViewPoint reports. If the reports have parameters such as invoice number or project manager, you can populate these using the data from the external data query by dragging and dropping the fields from the toolbox into the parameter field. You can do the same with the output file name for the report.

Specify the target for the report(s)

You can have your reports delivered to email, disk, FTP, SharePoint or even Dropbox. Every reports can delivered to individual project managers/users/vendors by using the fields from the external data query.

Finally, you can schedule the task to automatically distribute ViewPoint Crystal Reports at your desired interval.

To see how remiCrystal can help you automatically distribute ViewPoint Crystal Reports, click here to download the 14 day unlimited free trial.