BI Expert at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Business Objects and Crystal Reports - Use Windows Servers if you can afford the licensing.
What is most valuable?
We use the InfoView web based interface to host the enterprise reports. The Crystal Reports is a good standard reporting product from any single data source. WEBI allows us to use multiple data sources to produce one WEBI document that can have many reports. If the Universes are designed with cross data source linking in mind, the Webi documents can be used as a great tool to relate data from multiple data sources and environments.
How has it helped my organization?
Our reports are no longer just a static product. Our users can actually interact with the reports. Because of this, we can generate a single enterprise wide report and the users can simply navigate to see only what is pertinent to them. Prior to this, the developers maintained a lot of “one off” reports. Basically the same report for different departments.
What needs improvement?
Business objects service packs are as notoriously bad as Microsoft new products. Full of bugs, they fix one thing but break others.
For how long have I used the solution?
SAP Business Objects Universes and WEBI - we have been using it for 3 years. It was a progression from Crystal Reports which I have been using for 14 years.
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What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
Once you get your security strategy built correctly, things go fairly smooth.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Once installed we have had to go back to Business Objects to get patches. Part of this is our own fault for going to Unix and Tomcat servers (to save licensing costs). On a Windows Environment this seems to work better. SQL Server ODBCs on the Tomcat servers are troublesome. Once it gets set, things go pretty well.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability seems good. We have a large data repository. With over 23,000 users and 3,000 report. The reports are about 50/50 between WEBI and Crystal Reports
How are customer service and support?
Customer Service: Customer Service from SAP is good. Not stellar and not horrendously bad. I give them 6.5 out of 10.Technical Support: Depending on who you get. Some of their Technical support people are super great, others seem pretty novice about their product.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We have been a Crystal report shop for a long time as it is a product supported by or primary data vendor. We have also tried to go to SQL Server Reporting Service but found it too limited. We have one product now using Cognos Elite. I find it very comparable but more clunky to use.
How was the initial setup?
Complex if you are not using Windows Servers. There are a huge number of options that allow you to make detrimental choices that you may not be aware of. Not much different than any other enterprise wide reporting system.
What about the implementation team?
In House
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Unknown
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did evaluate other options, but the fact that we were already invested in the Crystal Reports and our major vendor was supporting the Business Objects platform, we really saw the most benefit going with them.
What other advice do I have?
Use Windows Servers if you can afford the licensing. If not be prepared to battle ODBCs, fonts, memory issues, and more. In the end, Cognos, Informatica, Business Objects, SQL Reporting Services require someone to know and understand the database structure. Good database structure results in good performance if the developers know what they are doing. If your databases are poor, you just amplify the problems with these kind of tools. These all simply provide an interface where someone has to define the table and data relationships. Finding the right person to do that is the key. Give them the tool that best suits the needs of the company.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Owner at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
Jul 3, 2013
Crystal Reports on SAP Mobile BI
It seems like every month SAP is unleashing new functionality for its Mobile BI app. Explorer, Web Intelligence and recently Dashboards have all made their way into the BI app and seem to work better, look nicer and perform faster then on the desktop! The mobile versions are not only slick and easy to use, they are also very easy to deploy to. For webi, all it takes to turn the report to mobile ready is assignment to a category (as is the case for Dashboards and Crystal), Explorer is there by default, and Dashboard can be saved as Mobile when exported to the repository. It’s that simple. Well, almost… While the product does allow developers to deploy content to the BI app very easily, the challenges of the design are still there, with a twist. Data issues, business logic complexities, real estate constraints, functionality gaps, all of the same challenges that make BI content development difficult for any device are applicable, with the additional challenge of new constraints related to mobile device usage and functionality that is “ramping up”. And while Webi, Explorer and Dashboards are “sexy”, dashing and elegant tools, I set out to try the capabilities of good old Crystal Reports on the BI App, and as always when it comes to Crystal, I was not disappointed!
While Crystal on the iPad lacks some of the Explorer and Webi “swooshiness” and feels a bit “boxy”, it certainly provides much more flexibility in design, navigation and layout capabilities. And since images can be used to enhance its look and feel, Crystal can be made to look as modern as any. Unlike in Webi on the mobile BI app where the report design is limited to simplistic blocks that get converted automagically to the stunning iPad design, Crystal reports will render EXACTLY the way you design them on the desktop. So you can layout the screen any which way you like, which can be very important for some design situations. Crystal unlimited data connectivity also makes it a great choice for directly connecting to any data source with ease. So your crystal report on the iPad will connect to anything you need to, from Universes to any RDBMS, web service, and beyond. The group tree functionality is also enables on the iPad and provides slick and easy way to navigate large hierarchies on the iPad, prompts, work as well and drill downs are all there in their interactive glory. You can paginate using the page number icons, or simply swipe left to move to the next page. Nice.
The image I posted is from a Crystal Report I created with sales data and hierarchy, and I hope it provides a good example of what Crystal actually looks like on the iPad.
So, all in all, Crystal can be an important companion for your mobile BI content deployment, and after more than two decades of reign over the enterprise reporting realm can still help address use cases and reporting scenarios that other more modern tools cannot.
Disclosure: My company is a SAP partner
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
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Both Pros are very true. I really like how many different options there are. These options are fantastic to get the specific data that a customer is after. There are instances where a SQL command may not be able to completely get the data desired, but there are so many other ways to dive further into the data through report queries, formulas, and creative supression techniques that eventually you can get a report that is very specific and provides customers the data they want. The downside is - for a developer that is new or inherrits some monsterous reports, sometimes it involves peeling back multiple layers to truly discover how the report is rendered.