Non technical - but (serious) request for information

[brendanj68]

Hi all

I am hoping that someone can give me a few pointers - I have just been informed by our highly efficient central Technical team, that they want to re-engineer all the CR v9 reports I done back into CR8 so we can run them directly from our corporate CRM system. My request is, is there any data on the benefits of CR9 over CR8 that i can use to keep my job!

Big thanks in advance

 

[TomKane]

I'm not sure. But usually on the vendor web sites you get a list of improvements between versions. Is there a specific reason why cr8 and cr9 works on your crm system?

 

[TomKane]

Maybe this will help:

http://support.businessobjects.com/fix/whatsnewcr.asp

 

[brendanj68]

TomKane,

Thanks for the pointer will hopefully find what I need, in answer to your question, we use a product called Pivotal (from Pivotal Corp) and this version only works with CR8 as the 'internal' report writer.

Brendan

 

[Mike Lewis]

brendanj68,

If you want some killer features to quote back at your tech boys, I would suggest the following:

- Crystal Repository. Lets you construct re-usable functions, text objects, etc. for the first time.

- Report Templates. Lets you impose a uniform look and feel to all your reports.

Then again, they might perceive those as benefits to the developer, not to corporate or CRM guys. Maybe we should ask why they feel the need to downgrade in the first place?

Mike


Mike Lewis
Edinburgh, Scotland

My Visual Foxpro web site:

http://www.ml-consult.demon.co.uk

My Crystal Reports web site:

http://www.ml-crystal.com

 

[rhinok]

brendanj68 - another issue is that CR9 reports are not backwards compatible, therefore, they won't be able to easily convert the reports to an older version. All of the reports will need to be rewritten from scratch.

 

[reporting]

Although I haven't worked with Pivotal, I have worked with a number of other similar CRM apps, and I think I know what the problem is here...

Last summer, I wrote some rather complex CR reports for the local SalesLogix consulting house. I was rather surprised to find out that the version of SLX their client was using required CR version 7 reports! The explanation I was given was that, even though their client's version of SLX was not much more than a year old, it shipped with version 7 of CR.

As a result, their SLX Admin module required that the reports also be in CR 7. Which was too bad because one of the primary benefits of moving to CR 8.0 was increased reporting speed!!!

I could very easily have done the reports in CR 8/9 outside of SLX. But then the reports would not have been 'controlled' by the SLX Admin module...

Like I said, I haven't worked with Pivotal yet. But I have worked with a number of other apps that work the same way as SLX does. In fact, I worked with BlackBaud's Raiser's Edge (fund-raising software for non-profit orgs) back around '97 or '98. They had totally integrated CR into Raiser's Edge, so much so that it did not look like CR because of all the buttons that were missing!!!

HTH,


John Marrett
Crystal Reports Trainer & Consultant

http://www.e-reporting.ca

 

[rhinok]

You hit the nail on the head John. I know of at least three products in use by my or my wife's company that still use CR7.