InstallAware

Hi all,

As you may remember, I'm trying to work with Business Objects (developers of Crystal Reports) to write a decent plugin for InstallAware, specifically for Crystal Reports XI (and R2).

Why? Their merge modules are serious bloat ware. Horribly large.
By recompressing them you can get the size down, but this is still not as good as it COULD be.

With a decent plugin, we could control what drivers are installed, etc, so anything that is not needed by your application was not included in your setup - this has the potential to significantly reduce the deployment size.

BUT....

Business Objects are not playing ball (they are saying their installer is proprietary, oh but you can go and edit it in Orca if you need to (work that one out!)).

SO

Does anyone here also use Crystal Reports XI (inc R2), and if so, would you be interesting in the plugin? IF the answer is yes, please post in this thread; assuming enough people post. I should be able to get some more progress

Regards,

Andy Neillans

I would be very interested in a Crystal Report XI Plugin.

How can I help?

Annette Harper

Andy,

I distribute CR XI R2 and would be very interested in a plugin.

So it's not just my customers who get sick of watching every language support dll under the sun being installed on their PC's!? Yeah - I'd definitely be interested in a bloat-free plug-in for XI.

We used to distribute our app with Crystal 7.0 and the size was about 24 megs. With no other changes the size went to 45 megs with Crystal 11.0

I watch as the installer carefully adds various DLLs for the Korean and Italian language when we only ever sell our software in Canada.

Anything to reduce "bloat" would be great, especially when you try to ship software electronically, every K saved, helps!