Crystal Reports Administration: Secure Report Delivery

A student on a recent training course raised this problem with report delivery. They had a crystal report that displayed a pay slip. They wanted a secure confidential method of getting the weekly pay slip to the correct person. Several solutions come to mind.

In the old days before computers each employee would get a piece of paper with their pay details. I can remember as a student working at a local dairy factory lining up once a week to collect a pay slip with some nice new notes and coins attached in an envelope. Well before the days of electronic payments and email.

If each employee has access to a report viewer on their computer, they could use that to view the report. Each employee would use their employee id to print their own pay slip. You could increase security by asking for an employee specific PIN number.

The major drawback of this method is that a report needs to be set up with the viewer and the employees must all remember to use it.

If the report viewer is Business Objects Enterprise or Crystal Reports Server then the report can be based on a Business View and loaded into the Enterprise database. As each user has his/her own log in to the server, the business view can use this information to present only the information for that user.

Nice and secure but this solution does require B O Enterprise and therefore the cost of licensing for each user.

Our SendMail User Function Library (UFL) has the ability to take a standard message and then replace tags inside that message with values from the database. The UFL is made available as a Function in the Formula Editor and processed as the report is viewed so it is a great way to send multiple messages from one report. Our SendMail UFL supports HTML formatted messages and the message editing features make this a low cost and powerful solution.

One big advantage of this and the next method is that the employee doesn’t have to do anything except read their email messages to get the report.

The report could use the "Multirun" feature within either scheduler to process the report for each employee and send to each employee.

In the final analysis, keeping things secure and private is like a game of hide and seek. Keep looking for vulnerabilities and find a mechanism to block that route. All delivery methods have a potential leak at the recipient.

If they share their email account or Enterprise server login with another person, then any of the solutions above become ineffective. But that would also be the case with a paper pay slip that your best friend collected for you.