Disclosure: I am anti-crystal, so this reply will have more then a few
cheap shots at it, along with some sarcasm ;)
So one person's inability to use something other then crystal is going
to cost the state tens of thousands of dollars in lost developer
productivity? Heh, sorry, I always get a kick out of these kinds of
things.
I know you can invoke a crystal report from a VBScript, because that's
how things were done on my wife's team before I led her to the
promised land of SSRS. I'll see if I can get something from her
(assuming they didn't burn the server that crystal was installed on).
I'd be more concerned with the user experiance. If I click on a link
to view a report, I expect it right away (this isn't even a SSRS vs.
Crystal thing), and I wouldn't want to have to goto another page and
search for my generated report.
Could you do something whereby you get the data required for the
report (snapshot) and use it to generate a report immediantly, while
at the same time sending the data off to your processing module to
satisfy the archiving process? In re-reading your post, that sounds
what you're trying to do with the second (new) web service.
Do the reports need to be generated when the user requests, or could
they be generated nightly ahead of time?