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Crystal Reports – Security Plug-in Error

After a recent installation of Crystal Reports Designer XI-R2, I attempted to connect to our Business Objects Enterprise installation to modify a report and was greeted with the error message:

Security plugin error: An error has occurred in the plugin, but the plugin is unable to return a detailed error message.

I'd been told that fixing this issue required a service pack to the Crystal Designer installation, but it was over 200MB and before I rolled it out, I decided to do a bit of searching. It turns out that this error is caused by a pair of missing DLL files on the local machine:

smcommonutil.dll
smerrlog.dll

You can get these files from your Business Objects Enterprise CMS servers, since they have the full install already, from either of these locations:

(Install Drive):\Program Files\Business Objects\BusinessObjects Enterprise 12.0\win32_x86\
(System Drive):\Windows\System32 (SysWow64 if you've installed it on an x64 system)

Grab those two files and copy them to the C:\Windows\System32 folder on your local workstation and you'll be good to go - now Crystal Designer connects to the BOE CMS without any complaints at all.

Thanks to this forum post for pointing me in the right direction!