HELP - What is this animal?

[dean12]

I got a call today from the "Big Cheese" and he wants a tool that customers can use to "develop" their own reports.

We use CR8.5 right now with SQL 2000 and while that works fine, I suspect that our end user would not be able to understand the data structure much less want to take the time to learn CR.

So I'm thinking we need some type of "higher-level" tool that will allow the user to: (1) produce some type of report that is meaningful to him or (2) mess around and feel good about things without any real results or (3) get frustrated and contract for development.

I'm really looking for results option #1. So is a product like Crystal Analysis geared for this type of environment? What have been your experiences? How have you used this product? Is Crystal actively promoting this product?

Appreciate your feedback.

dean

 

[OliverS]

Crystal Analysis is actively promoted by Crystal as their OLAP client. I'm not sure that it necessarily what your users want but liking OLAP myself I would think they could get some value from it.

You'd need to set up an OLAP server for it to use, I guess you have SQL Server Analysis Services and Crystal Analysis works fine with that.

Oliver