Looking for reviews of Crystal Enterprise 8.5/Crystal Analysis

[bessebo]

We have been using Seagate Info 7 for approximately 3 years. We have been using the "free" Seagate Info product during this time. Now we feel that it may be time to BUY Crystal Enterprise 8.5 but I am soliciting reviews on this product. Also, we want to do data warehousing using SQL2000 and Crystal Analysis gives us a front-end OLAP tool for viewing cubes that have been developed off of SQL2000 datamarts/data warehouses. Please post your feelings on Crystal Enterprise 8.5 (possibly as it compares to Seagate Info) as well as any reviews on Crystal Analysis.
Thanks in advance for the information. I am excited about moving to CE 8.5 and Crystal Analysis. Any information on developing within these environments would also be appreciated (customized dashboards, etc)...

Regards,
Bessebo

 

[dtaylor92]

CE 8.5 is certainly a lot closer to SI 7 than CE 8.0 was. You have a lot of nice scheduling capabilities and automatic output formatting and printing to destination. The "Select Expert" is gone from the ActiveX viewer, which we use a lot, so that's frustrating, however their CE add-on called RAS would allow us to build our own select expert if we decide we can't live without it. Scalability looks very good from what we've seen.

 

[bessebo]

Thanks for the info. I assume that CE 8.5 uses Crystal Reports for report development. I am a little unclear as to what you mean by the Select Expert being gone from the Active X viewer.The only Select Expert I know of is within Crystal Reports. Please advise...

Bessebo