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CA 9,10 and XI developers comments required

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Jun 27, 2005
5
AU
Sorry in advance for the length of this post, but I would really like to receive comments from other users/developers on some issues we are having with Crystal Analysis 9.
We have recently rolled out a number of simple CA9 worksheets, via CE9, connecting to Sql Server OLAP Cubes. Our user base of 350 is far from happy with a number of limitations we are encountering with CA. I would love to hear from anyone that a) has any suggestions to relieve any of the following issues or b) can let me know if they have been improved upon in 10 or XI.
Some of the issues are:
1. Member Selector - The window is small and not resizable. It must have been developed by a gynocologist was one of our users comments !

2. Member Selector again - When using the thin client can not save favourites and have them persist across multiple sessions.

3. Drilling in a large dimension through Member Selector is very slow. We have found that having the worksheet blank quickens it up.

4. Saved Views - Can't resave on a saved view. Can't copy saved views to another worksheet in someone elses Favourites folder. When calling up a saved view the columns in the worksheet are often very thin and cant be resized.

5. Saved views are lost if a new version of the worksheet is published. I realise that a saved view may not be compatible with a new version of the worksheet, but it doesn't even give you an option to retain them.

6. Exporting to Excel - Often crashes Excel on the desktop.

7. Can't export charts to Excel. It seems ridiculous that you would have to regenerate them after exporting the data.

8. General performance of the worksheets is poor. However, I can't fully point the finger at CA yet, until I have ruled out traffic problems on the network. Having said that connecting to our cubes via an Excel Pivot table gives far superior performance.

I really would appreciate comments on workarounds or improvements seen in later versions as I will need to make a call on whether to persevere and upgrade or start assessing other BI tools.

Many Thanks.
 
Comments required? Pretty demanding there ;)

CA is probably a dying tool as BO (and almost everyone else) has much better tools for OLAP functionality, so I no longer use nor suggest Crystal's Analysis product.

Wonder how that comment will go over...

-k
 
Im interested - what is the size of your data cubes? I have some cubes containing multiple dimensions with 000's of rows of data in the fact table. Yet none of our users suffer from slowness issues, even with our servers based in Belgium and users running the reports in the UK and US.

However, we are running Analysis 10, which, from the comments that you have made, has more functionality that CA9. For instance, we are able to resize the Member Selector window, both in the designer and viewer. Admitidly the size isnt saved, but thats a small issue really...
 
Hi BSGGod (Simon),

We have had a bit of a result since the post in that we have tested the Active X viewer as opposed to the DHTML viewer that we were using. Mind you we had to apply a patch to enable the option to switch viewers to come up in user preferences. This has given us the ability to resize Member Selector, cured most of the Export to Excel issues and given a performance boost.
Now we only need to get round a couple of issues to roll this out. The first being that unlike the Crystal Reports Active X viewer, the install of this viewer modifies the registry, which our standard desktop builds do not allow (our Service Desk will love us sending them round to our 300 odd users !). The second is that the user appears to have to live in the same domain as the analysis server to be able to connect to the data via the active x viewer.
 
Hi SydneyUser,

The ActiveX viewer is largely the same as CAPro itself. So I don't see an easy way to avoid registry changes.

The domain issue is because the ActiveX viewer makes a direct connection to the analysis server and the only way I know of to avoid the domain issue is to use http connections to the analysis server. If you do that then you'll need to change the cube source on all your CAR files. You'll still need PTS installed on the client machines but the activeX viewer install should handle that.

Oliver
 
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