Download PDF version of this faq: Seagate100101.pdf

October 1, 2001

Dear Customers and Partners:

October 2001 marks a significant change in Dynalivery's strategy. Parallel Crystal 1.0 (September 1998) through version 2.5 (July 2001) were based on an OEM license from Seagate/Crystal Decisions. The license allowed Dynalivery to modify the source code of certain Crystal Reports run-time libraries and embed them in binary form in our software. We have not renewed this license and are basing the current Parallel Crystal on the commodity run-time libraries in the Crystal Reports Designer packaged products. These commodity run-time licenses are conveniently available from Crystal Decisions and its worldwide distributors, both by web download and by physical media delivery.

Dynalivery's primary relationship with Crystal Decisions will no longer be as an OEM. Instead, Dynalivery will act as an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) in which we recommend Crystal Decisions products when they meet the needs of our customers and freely recommend other products when they do not. Dynalivery has championed the principle that customers should have the option of integrating Crystal Reports with the standards-based Web/Portal Server (WPS) of their choice. We will now champion the integration of a broader horizon of document producers and WPS’s.

As you may know, Dynalivery's upcoming Saffron Server will generate PDF, HTML, and other document types from multiple document producers, including both Crystal Reports and its competitors. We assure you that all of the functionality of prior versions of Parallel Crystal remains available in our current version via public APIs and will be fully backed up by our technical support service.

We now market Parallel Crystal as a Java /CORBA framework or middleware around the commodity Crystal Reports run-time libraries. Parallel Crystal 2.6 and successors in the 2.x series are for customers who wish to build scalable reporting applications using Crystal Reports 7 and its free commodity run-time libraries, a tremendous potential savings. The Parallel Crystal 3.x series is for customers who wish to use Crystal Reports 8.5 (and successors) from Crystal Decisions. Crystal Reports 8.5 has many great new features, including access of JPEG images from database BLOB columns and improved multi-line text controls. However, customers who choose Crystal Reports 8.5 may be subject to new run-time license terms from Crystal Decisions for high concurrency and/or report broadcasting

Please let me know if you have any questions about our strategy or if we can help you in any way.

Sincerely,

Rodney P. Zimmerman
President