Upgrade? or Extend?

[rheard]

We have a small team (2 of us) developing reports on CR 10 desktops, and publishing reports to CRServer 11. Nearly all the reports (approx 200) are scheduled to run early hours of the morning and are delivered by email to recipients; some are delivered to lan files.

Its next years budget-time, so we wondered whether we should upgrade the desktops to Crystal 2008, and the Server to BO Enterprise.

Would CR 2008 be able to publish reports to CRServer and/or BOE?
Would BOE give us more funtionality for the cost increase than CRServer (apart from allowing more user licences)? Or should we just extend the number of concurrent licences for CRServer?
As a rule, users dont log on to run their own reports.

Thanks for any advice,
Russ

 

[rheard]

Anyone got any thoughts on upgrading software (above)? I'm tempted to just extend the licences on CRServer, but CRServer doesnt seem to be able to publish reports to the web, to allow them to viewed in a browser - I guess I'm missing something here, not coming from a distributed/server background I probably dont understand what has to be in place to allow users to view/manipulate their reports in a browser - and this seems to be a logical extension to just delivering static reports by email.
Any advice would be appreciated.

 

[Tatertot45]

WEll, i looked at going to BO enterprise and the cost is deceptive. It didn't seem like much, but you have to get all these extra tools and what not. In my opinion, if you are not a large company that has a heavy demand for Enterprise functionality, just extend. Also, do some looking around. There are other reporting tools out there can can help you take the next step for your users. I'm a one man Analyst department. I do ALL the reporting. I went to Anyview IDS for some tactical reports, and use Crystal for everything else. I use Visual Cut to distribute reports regularly and am working on getting an OLAP tool in to help with some historical stuff. I think if you are a 2 person team, you can get creative with some 3rd party tools and create some better flows. There is more tools out there than you think, you just have to go find them.

 

[rheard]

Thanks for youe time, Tatertot45 - I'm coming round to thinking the cost of BO would be better spent on extending CRServer licences and getting hold of some 3rd party tools - I like the bursting facility of Visual Cut... that could potentially save us producing and delivering many similar reports.

 

[bdreed35]

CR Server is essentially another edition of BO Enterprise. There are differences, but they are tied to the amount of licenses you can have and types of report content. Based on what you have posted. I don't understand why you would be looking to upgrade since I have't seen that you need to do anything in Enterprise that you can't do in CR Server.

As far as CR 2008, I would consider upgrading to it, but I would wait until the new version of CR Server comes out to support the new features of CR 2008. Make sense?

~Brian

 

[rheard]

Thanks Brian - I was just trying to provoke a response such as "... do you realise BOE can do this, CRServer can't..." etc

From what I've seen/read/researched, I think you're right - I'll stick with CRServer for now, and probably use the Report Designer licences to upgrade the desk top CR10 licences to CR11.

(Though I'll ask for BOE and be grudgingly grateful when the budget cuts mean I can only have CRServer extensions... )

 

[bdreed35]

Unless you really need the features of BOE that CR Server doesn't have, there really isn't any reason to upgrade to it. It does cost alot more money, and based on what you are doing (scheduling and distributing), BOE won't give you anything better.
Now, if you start having people log in to view reports, or want to start using other reporting tools such as WebI, then you will need to look at upgrading. There is a mid market edition of Enterprise called Business Objects Edge Series that has a similar licensing model to CR Server, but allows you to start working with other types of content besides Crystal.

~Brian