>The details are still coming in: Crystal Reports is there reporting software

Victor -
Crystal has this thing called the APS server - it takes report batch requests and processes them. I don't know if it's marketed as such anymore - they usually change the names of their stuff every six months or so.

Also - the exact paradigm you've described has been written up years ago - The report server machine was one hop from the file server, and it had it's own private ethernet link to the server.

The user would submit a report request to the report server by inserting a record in a table [call it a job table] and the report server did a continual scan on this table looking for new records.

When a new record was found, the new report job was run and output to the appropriate printer.

I took that design and put it into a system over at Time Warner in 1994 with Fox 2.5 for dos.

But - you're talking about crystal. YOu could surely use vfp to run in the same fashion, but then you will be rolling your own crystal interface [not a trivial task, but do-able] hth - regards [Bill]