Last year I published the “Expert’s Guide to SQL Expressions, Options and Commands“, just as CR 12 was coming out. In the Guide I explained the workaround for passing multi-value parameters to SQL Commands. Up until today I had missed a new (but little noticed) feature of CR 12. Commands parameters in CR 12 have a new option that allows multi-value parameters. No workaround needed. And, because you can launch stored procedures from a command object, you can now pass true multi-value parameters directly to your stored procedures.

You will see this feature at the bottom of the window when you add a new parameter to a Command. However, if you are using versions 9 - 11 you will not have this feature.

I recently read a good article in Information Week. It discusses the recent consolidation in the BI market and compares the primary vendors, explaining the strengths and weaknesses of each. The article mentions SAP’s decision:

“to let Business Objects–the BI tools industry leader–operate autonomously”

The article considers this commitment as one of SAP’s strengths.

Business Objects is running a promotion for their entry level web portal, Crystal Reports Server XI. Crystal Reports Server doesn’t allow you to create reports but allows you to make reports available on a network server to users who log in through a browser. The promo price is $2,495 for five named users. The normal retail version is still $7,500 for 5 concurrent users which doesn’t seem like much of a promotional value to me. I seem to remember 5 named users being a free offer at one point but apparently that is no longer true.

But the real news isn’t the promotion itself. It is that promotions like this usually happen just before a significant product release. In this case it is probably CR Server 2008, but nothing will be announced until after the promotion has expired. If anyone has any insight into what is coming next, drop me a line.

Update - 5/21/08:
I heard from one of my readers who is a BO partner and they confirmed that Crystal Reports Server 2008 is to be expected in July 2008.

If any of you are considering migrating from a Crystal Reports/Business Objects based platform to the one provided by Actuate, you might find this link interesting. There are some comparative white papers there (lengthy registration required). I haven’t taken the time to request them yet so if anyone does and wants to provide some feedback that would be great.

According to this article at cio.com, SAP is going to start retiring some products that overlap between the SAP and Business Objects product line. Retiring products mentioned in the article include:

Business Objects’ SRC
SEM Business Consolidation System
Business Objects’ performance management product

But the most interesting comment to me was this one:

“It still has to deal with overlap between Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence, Dashboard Builder, Voyager and other products on the Business Objects side, and Visual Analyzer and BEx BI from SAP. Analysts expect mostly Business Objects products to take precedence.”

So it looks like Crystal Reports will survive this merger just as it did when BO purchased Crystal Decisions.

I have used Crystal Reports with Xbase (Dbase/Foxpro/Clipper) files for years, primarily with Goldmine. Goldmine is a contact manager and stores files in DBF format. With just about every Crystal upgrade I have had to change the way I make the connection to the DBF files. So I was surprised a few months back when CR 2008 (version 12) cleanly ran all of my internal reports with no changes. It Continue Reading »
CR 2008 Service Pack 0 breaks Xbase Connector

I have had 3 customers (so far) who have called me to fix their Crystal Reports for PeachTree 2008. These are reports that worked fine under previous versions of PeachTree but ‘break’ when run against 2008. And in 2 of the 3 cases the customer had been assured by PeachTree sales that the upgrade would not affect custom reports. That might be true as long as you aren’t using any balances from the CHART table or the billing address from the Customer table.

All of the balance fields in the CHART table have been renamed although the number of fields and their order seems to be exactly the same. Also the CUSTOMER table has lost the billing address fields which have been moved to another table.

If you need help with custom reports for PeachTree 2008, or any other version, give me a call.

For those of you in the Linux world, Business Objects has released a special preview edition of their XI Viewer that is designed for Linux. Keep in mind that this viewer, like the original edition (CR Viewer XI) will not allow you to run/refresh a report. You can only view reports that have saved data. While all of the commercial viewers can run and refresh the data of a Crystal Report, I am not yet aware of any of them that will run in Linux. And this one is free.

It looks like Business Objects is trying to put restrictions on User Group speakers again. For now they are focused on preventing one single consulting group from presenting at User Group meetings. You may remember me mentioning a former BO partner, CTTS in southern Michigan. CTTS provides the leadership for two BO user groups and also provides very popular presentations for other user groups across the country.

But as you may remember from previous BLOG posts, CTTS had a nasty legal battle with BO and BO was forced to settle with terms they apparently didn’t like. Now one of BO’s User Group coordinators has started telling User Groups that BO will not fund any meeting where CTTS is doing a presentation. According to the group in Pittsburgh this means not only things like meeting space and refreshments, but it also means no BO speakers and no Email notification to the members.

Despite this, CTTS is still being invited and scheduled at meetings all over the country, but at least one BO group in Kentucky seems to be so interested in following BO’s lead on this that they have asked CTTS staff not to even attend their meetings, let alone speak at them. BO denies that their policy forbids anyone from attending meetings. And they have told me that this does not (currently) apply to all independent speakers - just to CTTS. But if this tool is effective I doubt BO will stop here.

The sad part is that user groups have to work to find practical and interesting presentations. So, if you are part of a BO user group you should find out if your group is more interested in a free lunch or solid product information.

Business Objects has decided to make the Crystal Reports XI sample database and sample reports available for download on their website. This is the Xtreme database which is the Microsoft Access MDB provided with all prior versions of Crystal Reports. The sample database and sample reports for CR 12 (2008) is all in XML. To make the MDB behave like a client server database you can follow my instructions for setting up an ODBC connection.