Going from Crystal Reports 8 to Enterprise XI R 2

[ashleybyrdnc]

We have been using Crystal 8 for quite some time now and just installed Business Objects Enterprise XI R2 on another sever. So now we are planning on using the Crystal Server and Infoview. Going from Crystal Reports 8 to XI is a huge change for us considering we are going to being using the Crystal Server.

I am having a hard time finding instructions on how to start from scratch in setting up your repository, Business views and Universes. All the documenation I have found talks about importing your stuff. We have nothing set up like this at all with our current setup and I am not able to use the import wizards. I have figured out quite a bit on my own but still missing some stuff. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Also I am getting a File Repository Server Error: Failed to communicate with server Input. Server is down or is disabled. I have checked the Central Conf Manager and it says its running, I even restarted them and it still isn't working? Am I missing something?

One more question which do you prefer using Microsoft's Enterprise Manager to connect to your ERP tables or should I spend the time importing them into a Business View because there are 100's.

Thanks in advance

 

[hilfy]

Although Crystal XI and above will connect through a universe to get it's data, a universe is NOT required for Crystal - you can still get your data the standard way by linking tables together.

Many folks that I've talked to were able to use their version 8 and 8.5 reports in BOE XI without converting them at all. However, we had to re-do most of our 8.5 reports because we had updated the SQL in all of them to remove the table-owner (we're using Oracle and you don't need to qualify the table names with the table-owner.) When we tried to run the report in BOE, the links between the tables were lost in the SQL - even though they were displayed in the Database Expert. This caused no problems if there was only one table used in the report, but was a major issue if more than one table was being read. We ended up having to re-create the reports from scratch because the problem didn't go away when we opened them in Crystal XI and then saved them as the XI version.

So, if you've added your own SQL or modified the Crystal-generated SQL in any way in your version 8 reports, you'll have to recreate them in XI. If you haven't, they should convert cleanly. Also, I personally wouldn't go the Business View route if I could avoid it - they're very difficult to maintain and, IIRC (I may be wrong!) I don't think you can use more than one BV to provide data within a report, just as you can't use more than one universe to provide data in a report. Most of the time what I hear people using BV's for is data-driven prompts like cascading dynamic parameters.

-Dell

A computer only does what you actually told it to do - not what you thought you told it to do.

 

[groggle]

You should be able to use the publishing wizard to publish your existing version 8 reports up to BOE XI R2.

If you have all of your version 8 reports in the folder hierarchy you wish replicated on BOE XI R2 then the publsihing wizard will create the folders for you.