A. Crimestar Software is used primarily by hundreds of small and medium sized county and municipal law enforcement agencies in various states throughout the US. Our products have also been licensed for use by large organizations and specialty law enforcement agencies such as College and University Police, Indian Tribal Police, Park Rangers and Regional Narcotics Task Forces. In most cases Crimestar is used as a complete organizational records management system. However, in some cases it is used as a specific records or investigations tool by specialty personnel or departmental units, such as Narcotics Officers, Gang Investigators, Crime Analysts and Community Policing specialists.
A. YES! - Crimestar is designed to function in either a stand-alone or network environment. In fact, the Professional Edition of Crimestar is network independent, allowing you to use virtually any kind of network that will permit you to "MAP" a drive and share it or make that drive available for both read/write operations to the workstation computers running the Crimestar program.
A. It depends on which edition of the program you are referring to:
Professional Edition: In the truest sense of Client Server, NO. Crimestar Professional Edition is a simple LAN based application. The application software runs on your desktop computer, while the database can either reside on the same computer in a stand-alone environment, or on a different computer designated as the "Server" in a network environment. This simple design approach does not require the use of a separate database server program. This in turn minimizes program and system complexity as well as the costs that are sometimes associated with these high-power database engines.
Enterprise Edition: Yes, this edition is a true high-volume, high-performance Client/Server system that utilizes the Microsoft SQL Server database engine. This edition of the product is scalable to handle very large agencies or agencies with multiple-substation facilities and provides excellent database integrity and security.
A. YES! - While the Professional Edition of Crimestar does not use a client server database engine, it does have a high-powered database engine of its own. With all databases, performance tends to degrade as database size increases. Crimestar is no different, however Crimestar can handle files which contain 100's of thousands of records with impressive speed. Of course, the power and speed of your computers and the saturation level of your network play a major role in overall system speed. The Enterprise Edition of Crimestar does use a high-power client server database engine that can handle extremely large volumes of data (usually Terabytes).
A. BIG! - Crimestar's database actually consists of many different data tables. The database tables used with the Professional Edition can grow to a maximum of 2 Gigabytes each (this is a limitation imposed by the Microsoft database used by Crimestar Professional Edition and not by Crimestar itself), the maximum size of the database can potentially be many (hundreds of) gigabytes of data as multiple database tables are used. Because of this capacity, Crimestar Professional edition is capable of handling the volume of data created by most law enforcement agencies.
Enterprise Edition uses a client server database engine (Microsoft SQL Server) that has no 2 Gigabyte table limits and is capable of growing much larger with database sizes entering into the multiple terabyte range.
Windows Platform, Windows 11 and up.
Recommended system:
| Processor: | Pentium 2 Ghz (or faster) |
| RAM: | 4 Gigabyte (16 for 64bit OS) |
| Disk: | 5 Gigabytes |
| Video: | WUXGA (1920 x 1200) Dual Video card if running CAD |
| Network: | 1000-mbs |
While a 2 gigabyte (2 billion bytes) maximum table size can hold thousands of normal records, an obvious exception to this is where the database storage of digital photos is concerned. A normal database record that consists only of text fields may be, for example, 1,000 bytes long.
Thus, mathematically a 2-gigabyte table capacity would be able to hold 2 million records (2,000,000,000/1,000). However, with the increasing pixel resolution of digital cameras many digital images can be very, very large. If a single digital image is, for example, 1 Megabyte (1,000,000 bytes) of data then a table with a 2-gigabyte capacity can only hold 2,000 images (2,000,000,000 / 1,000,000) before reaching capacity. So if you intend to capture high resolution booking or evidence images where each image may be rather large, or if you intend to store a moderately large volume of digital images in the database so those images are available for instant recall and display, then it is highly recommended that you use the Enterprise Edition of Crimestar where no such 2 gigabyte table size limit exists.
A. Yes! - Pricing between the two systems is the same. The requirements you will need to address is that Enterprise requires the licensing and use of Microsoft’s SQL Server. Crimestar DOES NOT provide this system. Check with your local I.T. for pricing. You will also need a true “Server” machine. Crimestar Support will assist you in the migration of your Professional data into the Enterprise system.
A. YES! - All Professional Edition Crimestar data is stored in "DBF" type tables which can be read by other popular desktop applications such as Word Processors and Spreadsheets using standard ODBC connectivity. Enterprise Edition data is stored in a SQL type database and can also be read using ODBC and other popular reporting tools and programs. Additionally, Crimestar® supports certain specific export functions which can be used to create and save files in different formats.
A. YES! - Crimestar has a built-in report generator so you can create your own simple reports. Beyond the built-in capabilities of Crimestar, data can be accessed by many "off the shelf" reporting programs, such as Crystal Reports, R&R Report Writer etc. Once this data is exported it can be used in conjunction with other Analytical and Crime Analysis tools.
A. Crimestar's absolute minimum specifications are very modest. As a general rule, if you can run Windows 10 or higher you can probably run Crimestar! Please read or System Requirements Page for more specific information.
A. All Crimestar products are true 32-bit software applications which requires a true 32 (or 64) bit operating system. You Should be running Windows 10 or above.
A. Generally No. Generally No. The Professional Edition Crimestar is completely self-contained using a desktop DBF type database. The Enterprise Edition requires the customer to license separate commercial client server database software such as Microsoft SQL Server. If however, you wish to take advantage of certain features within the program you may need additional equipment or software not supplied by Crimestar Corporation. This optional equipment could consist of a barcode scanner and digital camera. To use the diagramming features that Crimestar is capable of you should consider licensing an OLE compliant diagramming tool such as SmartDraw, Visio, Easy Street Draw and others. These diagramming products are not provided by or licensed by Crimestar USA, LLC, however Crimestar will work with many of them.
A. Generally speaking, YES. Each software program or system has its own method or format in which data is stored. Due to the wide variety of systems and file formats each data conversion task is different.
Crimestar DOES NOT do data conversions!
A. In most cases Crimestar either already has or can get the offense codes that are used in your particular state from an existing Crimestar customer. Those codes can then be easily imported into your database. Having said that, there will likely be some local regulations and ordinances that you will still need to enter, however this can usually be done in about an hour. Having said that, consider the following points:
A. Crimestar RMS is licensed per concurrent user. What does that mean? Because Crimestar is distributed via the internet, we have no way to control the number of computers it is installed on. What we can control is the number of concurrent or simultaneous users accessing the database.
Example: If your agency purchases 7 user licenses, you can install Crimestar on as many networked computers as you wish within your agency, however the software will prohibit more than 7 people from using it at any one time. When the 8th person attempts to sign-on to Crimestar they simply receive a message as follows: "Sorry, there are already 7 users accessing the system. Please try again later." When one of the original 7 users signs out and closes Crimestar, the license they were using then becomes available for someone else to use.
The concept is actually simple. The more licenses you purchase, the more users who will be allowed to access the central Crimestar database at the same time, but you don't necessarily have to purchase a license for every networked computer you have, unless you want all of those computers to be able to run Crimestar simultaneously. This permits great flexibility at a minimal expense.
If you intend to run Crimestar on a single non-networked computer, you only need 1 user license. If however, you intend to run Crimestar on more than one non-networked computer, a license must be obtained for each non-networked computer where Crimestar is installed.*
* Note, the license agreement distributed with the Crimestar software shall supersede any information listed herein.
A. The current price for Crimestar is published on our Order/Update page. Generally speaking, Crimestar is one of, if not the, least expensive fully featured packages available. Additionally, Crimestar's update and support costs are among the lowest in the industry.
* This price is subject to change without notice
A. YES. There is no penalty or advantage to licensing a few concurrent users, then adding concurrent user licenses as needed.
A. NO. Most companies in the public safety market tend to price their software per installation or per computer or even by your city population. In some cases, the price they quote fluctuates up or down depending on what they know your budget (which is public information) to be, or how much they think they can get! We don't believe in that kind of subjective and often discriminating price methodology. That is why publish our prices and stick to them.
A. The answer to this question has its roots in our product and marketing philosophy. Since our company is privately owned and has no debt, no loans or venture capital investors to repay and since we maintain very low marketing and operational expenses, we have the luxury of being able to charge less for our products than most other mainstream companies in this business. We understand that public safety budgets are often tight and that organizations often struggle to provide service to their respective communities while maintaining fiscal moderation. We also understand that the real cost of an information system is not just the initial license cost but also the recurring long-term cost for support and maintenance.
Crimestar software products are priced at a level which provides our customers with excellent value!
Most software products in this market cost considerably more to license and maintain than Crimestar, but don't necessarily provide any more reliability or capability than we do. If your only consideration is price, we have no doubt that you can probably find a few products that are less expensive than Crimestar too. However, when you consider all the great features, flexibility and capabilities that our solutions offer, it becomes increasingly clear that Crimestar software represents a great "bang-for-the-buck" for law enforcement agencies both small and large!
A. Yes. Crimestar USA LLC offers and encourages an annual software support and maintenance agreement to ensure that your agency will receive our product updates and technical assistance when needed. Unlimited technical support is provided via both e-mail and/or voice telephone and is provided for an annual fee per user license purchased. Additionally, your support maintenance agreement allows you to contribute to and receive all bug fixes and minor future product upgrades and enhancements without any additional charge.
To resolve technical issues, you should first check the published resources such as online help files and manuals. If after consulting those resources, you still need technical assistance you can contact Crimestar for additional help.
A. Licensed users with paid support agreements are entitled to all bug fix and minor update releases. While Crimestar USA LLC, does not make any specific promises or guarantees as to how many releases will be made available annually, we generally release several per year.
A. On-site training is not included as part of the license agreement for Crimestar. Most Crimestar customers have found the product to be intuitive enough to not need on-site training. However, where customers absolutely require system training, Crimestar USA, LLC can be separately contracted to provide on-site assistance and training at a rate of $1,000 per training day, plus expenses. While we charge for travel expenses, we don't bill the daily rate for days spent traveling. Often a 1-day on-site training session will require a total of 3 days (1 Travel day + 1 Training Day + 1 Travel Day) for our personnel. Our daily rate is based on time spent on-site, regardless of the number of agency personnel trained.
This rate is very competitive as many professional training centers charge as much as $200 per person attending the training class! Check out our Training Page for more information
PO Box 10756
Swanzey, NH 03446
info@crimestar.com
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