Crystal Reports vs Crystal Enterprise?

[UR2PUNK]

We currently have an intranet application that is using another reporting engine. BTW, reporting is only part of this application.

To access this application, our users go to a website (written in ASP) & when they request a report, they wait until the report is finished while their browser is in the hourglass state. Very inefficient especially when the report is huge.

What happens is a proxy evokes an object on a separate server. This separate server has the necessary data connection to our datastore. It also also contains the logic (queries) for the report & other business logics of the application.

When the data is ready, it is passed back to the webserver where the reporting engine uses the data to assemble a report from a pre-defined template. Finally, the finished report (PDF) is presented to the user's browser.

This is inefficient for the user who has to wait until the report is done. Also, it is taxing our server that gathers
the report data - this is not good since this server also hosts other business logics of the application.

We want to introduce a new reporting method where users submit the request for reports without waiting for the report to complete. This server will have the Crystal Report engine, connection to datastore, templates for the canned reports, accepts parameters from the submission made on the intranet site, queues by priortiy (some reprots might be run during off-peak hours due to it's complexity), & reports back when a report completes.

To accomplish above can we buy an edition of the Crystal Report 10, write code that accomplishes above & run it on a
dedicated server as a webservice? Meaning we'll have our own reporting server. Or do we need to invest in
Crystal Enterprise (which seems very expensive) & does a whole lot more?

Thanks,
Robert

 

[rhinok]

This is a classic 'build Vs. buy' scenario. The initial outlay of funds for Crystal Enterprise licenses is pretty expensive. But is it more expensive than a home grown solution that should be treated like a project, with resources allocated for requirements gathering, DCUT (Design, Coding and Unit Testing), System Testing, Defect Fixes and User Acceptance Testing? Also, don't forget about documenting your product and maintaining it. Lastly, what is the total investment in time (resources, money, loss of productivity, etc...).

You can definitely build a quality solution and it may be the best decision for you, but you should consider all aspects of the 'true' development cost in order to make an honest comparison.

You may be able to do everything you need with CE10 Developer or CE 10 Advanced, but you should compare the cost to the cost of CE licensing.

~Kurt

 

[UR2PUNK]

Kurt,

Thanks for your reply. I understand what you say about 'build Vs. buy' & the comparing of build cost to cost of CE licensing.

So far, as much as I can tell from the various PDFs on their site, the CE seems to offer more than what we might need. Our report templates will be built by select IT folks and what we are looking at is scheduling using windows queueing. Probably the front-end can run ASP.NET for the reporting GUI while classic ASP on other functions of the application.

I have couple more related question as I start trying to talk to BO to find out about pricing, etc.

1) If the templates are created by select IT folks then we need named-user licenses for those folks, correct?

2) If the cost of CE turns out to be prohibitive & we decide to build in-house the 'report server,' we need named-user for those developers, correct?

3) When the in-house 'report server' is completed, how do we license the CR on that box? Do we license by number of concurrent instances we want to run? For example if the server is to process 5 reports simultaneously, we would need 5 named-users on that server?

Robert

 

[chris777]

Before you get too caught up in the CE Pro model, it sounds like you could start of with a simple report server. If you are building your application in ASP.NET, you buy Crystal Reports (Developer Edition) and include your reports in your application. Developer edition includes a scaled-down version of CE which has no security and does not allow load balancing or failover between multiple servers and only allows for three concurrent report requests at a time. The upside is you can buy a Web Farm license which allows you to run a separate report server and removes the last limitation (on requests) that I mentioned previously. The Web Farm license is sold per processor and ther are ways to configure CE so as to give you some small measure of failover and loadbalancing on a single server.

To address YOUR questions:
1) You only need a copy of CR for your report designers or you can use the copy imbedded in VS.NET; however I recommend the full version. If go with a full CE purchase they will either need a logon to CE. The bad news is BOBJ is changing their licensing to either named or processor based, no more concurrent.

2&3 seem to imply: "if we use Crystal Reports with a report server application we build in-house...". I would be carefull of the legality of that. I'm not sure how BOBJ views distribuing their reports over the web without licensing it?

If you are building a client-server application then everything I just said is irrelevent. When you distribute a client server application I beleive you just need a copy of CR ADV with your application server.


I hope this wasn't too much information to quickly...



Chris
Data Intelligence Group

http://www.digus.com

 

[UR2PUNK]

Chris,

No, this wasn't too much information too fast ;-) With no contact back from BOBJ, I appreciate the feedback from realworld users in various forums.

By client-server do you mean 'fat' client? If so then no, our intranet application is accessed through the brower by our staff. Nothing goes outside our firewall - delivery of the report is internal too.

By 'delivery' I mean when the PDF report is created it'll be dropped in a file server somewhere on our LAN.

I now understand how the CR lciensing for the CR designer works.

That scaled down CE included in CRDEV perked up my ears. Especially since there can be scalability with the farm option. Would I get into legal issues if we build an application server (I've been calling the reporting server in this thread) that receives requests, builds the reports, & drops on a different file server somewhere?

Need a little clarification on your "... distributing their reports over the web without licensing it?" reply.

Finally, the goal we have is to build an application server (webservice) that recieves request from our intranet site, prioritizes, fulfills the requests by building the PDF report off of the canned reprot designed by our reprot designers, & drops them onto a file server somewhere.

Sorry for being a little long-winded here

Thanks for your continued help.
Robert

 

[chris777]

I have worked with BOBJ (Crystal Decisions) for a number of years and the distribution of reports over the web (outside of CE) has always been a contentious issue for them and their users. Maybe this will help:

1) If you buy a full verion of CE and you schedule reports to run and the destination of the result goes to a file share on the network, that is considered a "unmanged disk" location in BOBJ terms. To do this requires a Report Distribution License which is not included with the original licensing needed to just run CE. This additional license will run you $10K. The best way is to have the reports run and stay inside of CE, then the web application logs onto CE and retrieves the appropriate report. It is not a difficult think using the SDK. I *assume* this is the same for the CE Embedded version in .NET.

2) When I use the term Web Farm, don't get too excited. What BOBJ calls a Web Farm license is simply a processor license for a single machine. You cannot scale this horizontonlly (across multiple machines).

3) I cannot give you a distinct answer regarding the legality of distributing CR using "other" means. On Ken Hamady's site, there are links to various Crystal add-on products including ones that distribute reports like CE:

http://www.kenhamady.com/bookmarks.html.

I would check these out as an alternative to building your own.



Chris
Data Intelligence Group

http://www.digus.com

 

[UR2PUNK]

Chris,

Now I understand why after reading PDFs on their site, I never understood the delivery portion t#-)

1) I want to make sure I'm not asking you the wrong questions. Just to make sure - do I even need to use the scaled down version of the CE included in the CRDEo do what I want to do?

2) When you say "... legality of distributing CR ..." --- am I distributing CR if the only thing that I want to give the user is the path to the resulting PDF report so they can open it in Acrobat, save somewhere, etc?

I guess I've officially confused myself as to CR vs CE

Thanks for your help!

Robert

 

[chris777]

First, to clarify product differences; CR is the report designer and CE is the server based management/processing/security software that you can add reports to.

Second, the "scaled down" version is called CE Embedded and it is included with CR Dev Ed.

Third, whenever you add a report to CE, schedule it to process and export to a location outside of the secure CE environment, that is considered distribution. If you have a report open in the CR designer, hit the export button and save it to a location, that is ok. It is the difference between manual distribution and automated distribution. The same *MAY* apply to adding a CR to a web application then running it and exporting it to view. The process is automated and thats where things get a little sticky. Like I said in my first email, the legalities of distribution and exporting are something I would suggest you talk to a BOBJ rep about. I don't want to lead you too far astray either way.

Don't feel bad, everyone gets the same quesy feeling trying to understand BOBJ products and EULAs. %-)

Chris
Data Intelligence Group

http://www.digus.com

 

[UR2PUNK]

Chris,

Happy New Year!

I finally got an email from BOBJ rep on the 29th & responded immediately with the questions. I hope we'll get some answers this week.

Now I'm a little concerned that considering changing the reporting engine to Crystal might be 10x more costly than what we have now.

Even if we change only the reporting engine on the IIS server which hosts the intranet site, we will be limited to 3 concurrent processing of the report requests with the Crystal Embedded.

Robert

 

[UR2PUNK]

Oops, I didn't complete my thought in the reply above. Another question I posed BOBJ was who owns the resulting report (whether PDF, Excel, etc)?

Robert

 

[chris777]

That limit on the embedded product is because Crystal considers it a "development" version. You won't have that limitation once you add a Web Garden license.

I don't really know how to answer the 2nd question. I guess the company "owns" the report.



Chris
Data Intelligence Group

http://www.digus.com

 

[UR2PUNK]

Chris,

Maybe I need a legal team to work with BOBJ ;-)

All joking aside I'll let you know of my experience dealing with them & the answers I might get from them.

Boy, I would like to keep it simple. I'm not even asking the engine to 'pull' info - we will make it so that the other middle tiers 'push' the necessary info to the reporting server web services we will create.

Robert