Crystal Enterprise Implementation and Roll-Out Plan 3

[outra9e]

We have recently purchased Enterprise 8.5 and I will looking soon to install and implement a test environment to start preparing myself.

Can anyone provide or point me in the right direction of an example plan for implementation and / or rollout as I want to make sure that I plan this correctly.

Cheers

Andy

 

[Burgovision]

In my experience don't engage a crystal consultant - waste of money. The consultant didn't do anything we couldn't have done ourselves and he didn't impart any information we couldn't have got from a book.

I'm in the middle of an implementation at the moment going from SI 7 to CE 8.5.

Crystal have never given us any sort of implementation plan or any documentation. I guess they want to force us to use their overpriced services as much as possible. This has essentially meant we've really just had to blunder through it. It hasn't been too much of a drama but it has been a lot of hard work.

Sorry I haven't got much help for you... just relaying my experience and advising you strongly not to waste your money on using a Crystal Decisions consultant.

 

[SteveRemington]

Assuming that you have a reasonably straight forward environment (e.g. single server installation) you should be able to do it yourself.

My only suggestion is that you take plenty of time consider and plan your folder structure and security model before you progess too far. It is sometimes easier to get it right up front after a little planning rather than try to fix a poorly planned model later.
Regards,
Steve Remington
Wave Business Solutions
steve.remington@wavebusiness.com.au

 

[TimT12]

We just implemented CE 8.5, upgrading from 8.0, using a rollout plan that I developed. As you can tell by my nickname, I work at a Fortune 100 company where we had the resources to create a swing environment (a duplicate set of servers) running CE 8.5, and imported all our objects from CE 8.0.

I HIGHLY recommend setting up CE 8.5 concurrently (on separate hardware) and importing all objects from the previous version. Doing an in-place upgrade was an idea we examined, but it turned out to cause many problems. A nice clean install created stability that we did not have under 8.0. I can't speak to upgrading from older versions (SI 7, etc.).

Our procedures were fairly complex given our high degree of customization and number of reports, but the installation of CE itself is not that difficult, whether using multiple servers or a single server.

I disagree with the previous statement about Crystal consultants, we employ two and have found them to be of immense value. However, I imagine the knowledge of the individual consultants varies.

-Tim

 

[outra9e]

Essentially, this is not an upgrade. It is an original reporting portal, and so I will be installing the software and rolling out our environment from scratch, uploading existing reports as needed etc.
It is more from a business perspective that I am looking for examples.
A paperwork plan if u like of how someone rolled out enterprise...
If anyone has a sample like a case study or similar this would be great cause I could plan mine around this... Andy Farr
Webmaster, Baan and Crystal Enterprise Administrator
Tokyo Electron Europe Ltd
+44 (0)1293 650800 +44 (0)7732 438570
andy.farr@teel.co.uk outra9e@hotmail.com