We all know that currently any IM user who requests the IM Report is the only user who can view the Crystal Report. If this is something you'd like to see enhanced, please contact support to reinforce the need with product management where reports should be shared via an admin role.
Although it's highly recommended that you keep Crystal Reports as your default file format, to ensure all the rich & dynamic features remain functional, you may find it necessary to alter the default format to PDF.
In the field some customers have worked around the limitation of NOT being able to share the crystal reports to other IM users by storing the PDF reports on a network share and then sharing that location with the user's who need to simply view the reports. Typically users viewing reports aren’t the users who are requesting the reports through IM, especially for reports like “non-standard accounts” where managers want to hold their IM administrators responsible for keeping IM in good working order. These reports are typically created by the Identity Manager system manager admin and delivered to their boss.
If the above sounds similar to your business requirements, you may want to consider the following:
Here’s the procedure we just leveraged to reconfigure the default output to PDF, rather than Crystal.
Change the file format of the Report(s)
- Click on Start>All Programs>BusinessObjects XI 3.1>BusinessObjects Enterprise>BusinessObjects Enterprise Central Management Console.
- The Central Management webpage will open.
- Logon as administrator.
- Click on Folders.
- Open on IM Reports.
- Right-click on the (Crystal Report) and click on Properties.
- Expand the Default Settings.
- Click on Format.
- From the Format Options drop down, select the PDF option.
- Click on Save.
- On the left-side menu, click on Destination.
- From the the Destination drop box, select the File System option.
- Select the Use Default option.
- Repeat these steps for all the reports you wish to export to PDF.
Change the output location of the Crystal Report Job Server
- Click on Start>All Programs>BusinessObjects XI 3.1>BusinessObjects Enterprise>BusinessObjects Enterprise Central Management Console.
- The Central Management webpage will open.
- Logon as administrator.
- Click on Servers.
- Right click and select Properties on Crystal Reports Job Server.
- On the left-side menu, click on Destination.
- From the the Destination drop box, select the File System option and click Add.
- Click File System below.
- Under Directory, write C:\Test
- Select the radio box Use Specific Name option.
- From the Place Holder drop box, add the following options:
- Title
- DateTime
- File Extention.
- In the end, you should see this text: %SI_NAME%_%SI_STARTTIME%.%EXT%
- Check box selected for Add File Extension.
- User name: enter domain\username that has permissions to the directory
- Password: enter the correct domain user password.
- Click on the Save & Close button.
Services and Partners have questioned whether or not CA Identity Manager can distribute an email to a list of people or group, with a report, which is automatically generated based on time event (say every 2 weeks)?
This use case can be partially automated utilizing a combination of the above PDF formatting change combined with page 186 of the Business Objects Enterprise Administrator's Guide, which covers Email destination properties, and can be configured on the output job server or the actual crystal report properties that will automatically generate an email when the report is executed.
The challenge here is to actually generate the dynamic report automatically, every two weeks, which is based on the latest data available in LDAP or audit RDBMS. Currently, this is a manual process, albeit you can leverage the recurrence scheduler, within the snapshot collection process, to automate the snapshot generation. However, when requesting the report, there's no way enter future date ranges or future snapshot times into the request report screen.
If this is something you'd like to see available within the OOTB feature set, within Identity Manager, please contact support to continue to build a business case for a functional enhancement. The recurring scheduling of reports could help automate the production of historical data collection and ease the delivery of consumable audit information to the customer's ELT.
Enhancement wish list:
- Enable scheduled reports run on a regular "recurring" basis, based on the latest data available in the environment.
- We wish to run a scheduled snapshot at 4am each Monday morning, then run scheduled reports at 5am each Monday morning. The reports at 5am would utilize the snapshot from 4am.
- We want to run audit report 4am each Sunday morning and the Audit report would use a time span which encompassed the previous week, to produce the audit reports.
Current functionality:
- We can schedule snapshots on a recurring basis.
- We cannot schedule a report to utilize a future recurring snapshot time.
- We cannot schedule a audit report to utilize a future recurring audit time spans, without defining a basic scheduler (no recurrence) and manually entering each future report's date ranges.
Please post any questions or concerns.
Thank you.
Regards,
Chris Thomas
CA Technologies
Principal Support Engineer
Identity Manager Reporting Expert
Tel: +1-631-342-4360
Chris.Thomas@ca.com