The Crystal Reports Underground News - Volume 2005.03 (March 2005)
an independent source for Crystal Reports Information by Ken Hamady
Contents for March, 2005:
** Crystal Reports Server
** BO Enterprise XI
** No Broadcast License?
** My On-site Training Classes
** Another complaint about CR XI
** Another comparison of SSRS and CR
** My Library of Crystal Reports Materials:
Expert's Guide to Formulas
Expert's Guide to Subreports, Parameters and Alerts
Expert Techniques Volumes I and II
Quick Reference to Crystal Reports in Visual Basic
Quick Reference to Crystal Reports in VB.NET
** A formula that finds Easter for any year
** An improved formula for getting the report file name
** Read back issues at http://www.kenhamady.com/news.html
Crystal Reports Server:
Did Business Objects pull a fast one in December? Many of you received calls from your reps telling you that BO Enterprise XI would no longer be sold in CALs. The exception was if you owned or purchased CALs before the end of the 2004. Several of you even wrote to me that you thought this was a ploy. Maybe you were right.
In February, BO announced Crystal Reports Server which is aimed at small to medium sized businesses. CR Server, which is licensed in CALS, seems intended to replaces several Enterprise products including CE Standard, CE Embedded, and CE Express. But, CR Server is positioned as a Crystal Reports product, so technically these are no longer Enterprise CALs. Saying that Enterprise will no longer be offered in CALs is true, but that is not the same as saying that Crystal Reports can no longer be deployed on the web using CALs.
BO will not allow you to 'upgrade' from Crystal Enterprise CALs to Crystal Reports Server CALs. So, by getting people to buy more Enterprise CALs in December, they have locked them into the more expensive Enterprise platform. A 'downgrade' to CR Server would mean an additional outlay. Last, I received the announcement on CR Server on February 9th, or 39 days after the deadline for additional CAL purchases. I believe that BO has a 30-day limit on returns and refunds. Maybe this is all just coincidence.
The new Crystal Reports Server comes with a publishing wizard and a simple portal which allows you to put your reports on the web. It includes object, user and group level security. Since it is licensed in CALs I was puzzled by the user level security - CALs are not typically named users. However in Crystal Reports Server (I was told) you can create as many named users as you want, but only 5 of them can be active simultaneously. This allows you to set security permissions for users, groups and folders.
Then I read that it also allows scheduling, and I really got puzzled. It was starting to sound very close to BO Enterprise. The key difference is that CR Server can only be run on one server which limits it's scalability. There are other differences as well but I will go into those more next month.
The Crystal Reports Server starter pack includes one named user license for the report designer and five concurrent access licenses (CALs) for report viewing over the web. This pack costs $7,500 and includes one year of support. Expansion costs $7,500 for each additional 5 CALs, and you are limited to 20 total CALs. You are also limited to running it on a single server with a maximum of four processors. To go beyond these limits you need to upgrade to the BO Enterprise product line.
If you own either Crystal Reports Professional or Developer Edition you are entitled to a 5 named user introductory offer of Crystal Reports Server. These 5 named users allow 5 specific people to access reports through the server. You cannot share user names to give more than 5 people access to these reports. And, no, buying 2 copies of developer does not allow you to implement 10 named users. However (surprisingly) these 5 users can be added to the Crystal Reports Server starter pack, allowing "a mixed named user and CAL environment" according to one BO document. This combination may allow the 5 named users to run reports at the same time that the 5 CALs are in use. At least it should. Otherwise there is no point in adding the 5 named user license.
If any of you are already using the CR Server product I would like to know what you think.
Business Objects Enterprise XI:
Crystal Enterprise is now Business Objects Enterprise. Some of us suspected that this was intended to eliminate one of BO's competitors. The surprise is that the entire Business Objects product line is being migrated to run on the Crystal Enterprise foundation. One BO rep said that the next version of Enterprise (XI release 2) will only be an "upgrade" for a Crystal Enterprise user, but it will be a "migration" for a Business Objects user. BO is truly willing to take the best of each product line.
I have started researching BO Enterprise configurations and pricing for next months newsletter. Now that they have introduced CR Server there are only two configurations left in Enterprise: Professional and Premium. The funny thing is that these two configurations are not described on the BO web site when describing BOE. There are pages and pages of marketing fluff and a couple of PDF brochures, but no specifics on the features of each configuration. The only 3 sites I found that gave specifics for these configurations were written in Japanese, Romanian and Latvian. The Latvian site gave the following formula in English which isn't a bad starting point:
BOE Premium = BOE Pro + Explorer + Auditor + OLAP
Next month I will go into more detail, including the "top secret" prices for several BO Enterprise configurations. If any of you have received product specifics (or can read Latvian) and would like to contribute to my research, please drop me a line.
No Broadcast License?
I am still waiting on confirmation but it appears that the XI product line has removed all restrictions on "broadcasting" reports. Some of you may remember few years back when this license cost $100,000. In exchange, you were allowed to automatically email a report to 51 or more people each week. Then starting with v9/v10 anyone who owned the Advanced Developer Edition, which was less than $2,000, was given these broadcast rights. The restrictions remained only for users in an Enterprise environment. Now, with XI I don't see any mention in the licenses of an "automated distribution system". Of course you should always read the license for yourself. If you find this phrase, or get confirmation that broadcast restrictions have been removed, please let us know.
Expert On-site Training:
My specialty is teaching Crystal Reports at your office, with your data. And I charge by day, not by student. So, if you have 4 or more students you may find the cost of an on-site class less than the cost of sending the same students to a public class. Even if you have fewer students you might find the benefits of working with your own data worth the extra cost.
Do I teach a good class? I have personally taught 1975 satisfied students, including students at the National Institutes of Health, the Library of Congress and the Executive Office of the President. I am also the all-time, top ranked Crystal Reports expert at Tek-Tips.com. For more information you can call me at (540) 338-0194.
Another complaint about CR XI:
Everyone is excited about the new dynamic parameters features in Crystal Reports XI. However the new parameter format took away something that was really nice. I am referring to the calendar control date parameters. This used to be a very fast and intuitive dialogue. Now it is very slow, ugly and makes you enter the date in a confusing format. If you agree, please Email BO with your comments.
Another comparison of Crystal Enterprise and SQL Server Reporting Services:
Brian Bischof has written another comparison of SQL Server Reporting Services to CR/CE. It is free and you can either read it on his site or download it as a PDF. See the LIBRARY page of my site for the link.
My complete Library of Crystal Reports Materials:
http:/www.kenhamady.com/tools.html
Expert's Guide to Formulas ($36)
Expert's Guide to Subreports, Parameters and Alerts ($28)
Expert Techniques Vol. I ($19)
Expert Techniques Vol. II ($19)
Quick Reference to Crystal Reports in Visual Basic ($16)
Quick Reference to Crystal Reports in .NET ($14)
A formula that finds Good Friday/Easter for any year:
One of my most requested formulas is the one that calculates the number of business days between two dates, minus weekends and holidays. It is designed to work with a separate formula that allows you to store your specific holidays. This "holidays" formula can contain many years worth of holidays in advance, but each year's holiday dates must be specified.
Mike Cook of Shepherd Hardware Products decided to improve on this by writing a formula that creates the list of holidays for a year automatically. Most holidays are easy to determine in advance because they always occur on a fixed date or they occur in a specific week of a month, like Thanksgiving USA. The real challenge is Good Friday - the Friday before Easter Sunday. Because the date of Easter is based on a Lunar calculation it isn't as simple to calculate. Mike found an algorithm for calculating Easter and used it in a Crystal formula to determine the date of Good Friday. The Good Friday formula can, in turn, be referenced in his formula for creating the list of holidays for my formula. To see these formulas visit the FORMULAS page of my web site. Mike's formulas are 25 and 26.
An improved formula for getting the report file name:
A while ago I wrote a formula for removing the path from the Crystal Reports special field called "File Path and Name". This allows you to print the name of a report automatically on the page, even after you save the report under another name. My original formula started from the left and jumped from slash to slash to eliminate the path. This method was used because it would work in any version of Crystal going back to v7 and possibly further.
I recently got an Email from David Hopaluk, one of my readers, suggesting that I could start from the right and make it simpler. Of course he was correct and the simpler version I wrote now looks like this:
filename [ InstrRev ( filename , '\') + 1 to Length (FileName) -4]
This will not work in version 7 because the InStrRev() function was new with v8, but it will work with any more recent version of Crystal. For more useful formulas like this one see the FORMULAS page of my site.
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Contact Information:
Ken Hamady, MS
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(540) 338-0194
ken@kenhamady.com
http://www.kenhamady.com
Copyright 2005 by Ken Hamady
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