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Crystal Reports Basics: Crystal Reports User Groups
User groups and SIGS by locale:
You can also go to
www.businessobjects.com and sign up for a user group.
What if there's no user group in your area? What then? The answer is
don't wait for someone else to start one. Do it yourself.
Some benefits:
- Boost your Crystal Reports skills.
- Network the only way that matters (by doing things with other people and
for other people).
- Learn about related areas.
- Gain career contacts.
- Gain technical contacts.
- Make new friends.
- Possibly bring in new business contacts for your company.
- Possibly bring some freelance work for you; good income now, a backup if
you lose your job due to the economy or whatever.
How to do it:
- Contact Business Objects and explain you want to start a local Crystal
Reports User Group. They may even offer to send out someone to give a talk.
- BO will probably contact the users rather than give you their names. No
problem.
- Set up a Website with info about the group. Provide this to BO. This
site should also have contact information for reserving a seat at your first
meeting (and subsequent ones).
Tips on holding your first meeting.
- You will need 6 to 8 months to get a venue and get people interested in
attending. So don't think you can schedule something for next month.
Schedule it far out from the present date.
- Keep your first meeting to half a day. The idea is to get maximum
turnout. Don't do it on a Friday afternoon.
- A half day venue simplifies things, because you won't have to coordinate
lunch.
- Look for a convenient, reasonably priced venue. Hotels are usually your
best bet.
- Charge a little extra than the hotel's price per attendee, to cover any
contingencies. Note that you will probably need to put down half in advance.
- Provide an early bird discount. Suppose your meeting is on 20JUN. You
need $55 per person to break even. So charge $75 per person and make the
early bird discount $60 if they register and pay no later than 20MAY.
- Set up a Quicken (or similar) account so you don't comingle funds. Yes,
it is OK to actually deposit the actual money into your personal account (or
that of a business you own), but you must record the money in your books as
belonging to the group.
- As you continue to have meetings, you'll accumulate enough for the group
to have its own account.
To keep the group going:
- Write up job descriptions (simple ones) for the Chair, Vice Chair,
Secretary, and Treasurer. You will do all of these jobs, for now. As the
group grows, ask them to nominate someone for each of these positions.
- Write up simple bylaws. You need to establish the general rules of
governance, how officers are elected, and what constitutes a quorum for
executive committee meetings. See any other organization's bylaws, and adapt
those but make yours simpler.
- Get a copy of Roberts Rules of Order, if you do not already have one.
Learn this well. Use it for your executive meetings.
Also consider newsgroups. These can be a bit daunting at
first, but we suggest they are worth a look. It takes a little bit of time to
set up, but it’s free and has a vast amount of information available.
You start in Outlook, Internet Explorer, or your
preferred Browser or Email client. There will be a menu item to take you into "News".
e.g., in Outlook go to the View
menu bar then / Go to / News /. Or Explorer
/ Tools / Mail & News / Read News /. If you are
using this for the first time, it will probably prompt you for the basic
information you need to set it up.
You need to configure a News account to point to a
local news service e.g., in MS Outlook Newsreader / Tools / Accounts /.
You could try news.<your_isp.com.address> or
news.cogniza.com or ask your ISP if you can’t find one.
Then subscribe to news groups in that account. There
are thousands of newsgroups and you can subscribe to any of these. One we have found very useful is
microsoft.public.vb.crystal. Yes we know Crystal Reports is not a Microsoft product,
but it is included with Visual Basic so that is probably why it is there.
This article is copyrighted by Crystalkeen, Mindconnection, and Chelsea Technologies Ltd.
It may be freely copied and distributed as long as the
original copyright is displayed and no modifications are made to this
material. Extracts are permitted. The names Crystal Reports and Seagate
Info are trademarks owned by Business Objects. |
