Seagate Info is a
software package from
Seagate for
database reporting. It uses the same
reports as
Crystal Reports. The main difference between
Seagate Info and
Crystal Reports is the
Info Desktop and
Info APS. With Seagate
info you can setup a report
server that can run reports for you (moving the load off of your own
PC). It also handles report
scheduling, so you can have large
resource sucking reports run in
the middle of the night instead of during
office hours. It has a
myriad of other little features such as report
security, emailing of reports, a report
viewer,
web based report viewing,
OLAP support,
secured database views, and many other
utilities.
It is quite a useful software package, though not completely bug free by any estimation. The APS server can be quite finicky at time requiring fairly frequent service restarts. There is some ability to tie security to Windows NT accounts, but it ends up just being easier to create Info specific accounts. Also all printers and ODBC connections must be setup identically between the server and the computer that is used to design the reports. The report server portion can run on virtually any Windows 95 or newer PC and you can cluster report servers.
Perhaps the best feature of version 7 anyways, is that Seagate Software was giving it away for free. (With 1 report designer license and 50 user licenses) I can only assume that this generous offer was some way to entice larger clients into upgrading (for money) later on.