This month an unusual number of customers have brought me errors to troubleshoot.  Most of them involve errors outside of Crystal with things like missing DLL files or installs that seem the same but that behave differently.  So I was pleasantly surprised to find a recent blog post on the SAP web site that provides a list of free tools for helping to troubleshoot things like this.  There are 5 tools listed but I think two would apply most to the problems I faced this month:

1) Modules is a free utility from the SAP web site.  It allows you to run a report on two different systems (ie one that works and one that doesn’t) and find all the files that are different in those two environments.  It makes a list of the files used in each environment and then compares to see which are different. It is an old tool but worked fine in my Win7 64 environment.

2) Depends.exe (Dependency walker) is another free tool that takes an EXE or DLL file and lists all of the other files that it relies on.  This is perfect for when you have a DLL that won’t work or register correctly.  Often a missing dependent file is part of the problem.

And if you need to troubleshoot hangs and crashes, monitor HTTP / HTTPS traffic or monitor local file system and registry activity, the other tools should help.

Blair Wheadon of SAP has published an updated overview of Crystal Reports licensing terms.  He does a good job and covers multiple versions and editions.  So this is a good place to start if you have question on product licenses.  If this doesn’t answer your questions I might be able to help (I actually read them).

My only other comment on this article is that SAP still has not given up trying to add a hefty fee to every Crystal Reports course book produced  by anyone.  They try to do this by Continue Reading »
New Crystal Reports licensing overview

(See the update at the bottom of this post)

I don’t get to say this very often but SAP/BO did something very smart.  I am not sure when it happened but I wish I had known sooner.  They have set up a site for users to experiment with CR Server without having to do all the set up.  To use the buzzword, they now have an evaluation option “in the cloud”.  And despite the terminology it really is a great idea.

Many of you know that I spend a great deal of time promoting alternatives to CR Server, especially to folks who mainly want to schedule reports for Email delivery.  Simple scheduling can be done for free and even complex scheduling and bursting can be done for a few hundred dollars.  But CR Server is a viable option for providing on-demand reports to browser-based users.

The challenge to the CR Server salesman is that no one wants to commit $10 – $20K on a product without trying it.  And trying CR server can also mean trying your patience.  Before a potential user can experiment with all the wonderful things that CR Server can do they Continue Reading »
Evaluate CR Server “in the cloud” (or maybe not)

You still can’t see CR 2011, but if you want to know what some of the problems are you can read the release notes.

Nothing earth-shattering, but a few of interest:

ADAPT01353630 – you can’t save a report with a Continue Reading »
Crystal Reports 2011 Release Notes

I just learned that SAP has been testing a site for submitting, discussing and rating proposed product enhancements. It is called the Idea Place and it is a great idea.   Apparently this has been up since October but no one thought to tell me about it so that I could share it with you all.  As Curly would say “Da noive!”  So I have spent the past few hours making up for lost time and imparting my wisdom.

Feel free to join in the fun.  Anyone can read the posts but you have to register to share your opinions. It is still in Beta so it is a bit clunky to navigate and slow, but I expect that to improve in time.  The link above is for Crystal Reports but there are forums for all SAP products.

During 2010 I wrote six different articles that compared the features of different Crystal Reports utilities.  I started last January with server-based tools and continued every other month with a different product family.  Now that we are back to January I have decided to provide an annual update to each feature comparison to account for new products and upgrades to existing products.

So this month I have revisited the features of the server-based deployment options from January 2010.  I have listed any new features from last year’s products and have also included two new products.  If you are aware of any other products that should be included in this comparison, please drop me a line.

I have been working for about a month on writing two Crystal Reports tests (Intro and Advanced). They will mirror what is covered in my classes but I think they will also be useful in other areas. There are 20-25 questions in each test and in my next newsletter I am going to ask for volunteers to take the first draft so that I can calibrate the questions.

If anyone is interested in taking one or both tests, you can download them here.  Send in your answers to get your scores.

I found a couple of articles that mention a new ‘student edition’ of Crystal Reports.  It is being offered in Australia in early 2011 and it isn’t clear at this point if it will be offered anywhere else.  This is the first time I have ever heard of a Student Edition for any Crystal product, so this might be an experiment.   Or this might be part of the normal promotional discounting that SAP/BO seems to do just before the release of a new version.  Crystal Reports 2011 is due out in Q2 of 2011.

If any of you are students in Australia and take advantage of this, please let me know.

Crystal Reports 2011 just finished Beta and is coming out within the next 6 months (Q2).  Don’t expect dramatic changes.   You can read about the new features in this PDF.  There is also a video of CR 2011 within Enterprise,  which is a slightly different version so the features highlighted are mostly related to enterprise users.  I have also read that the interface for CR within Enterprise will be different than in the standalone version of CR 2011.  The one within Enterprise is more consistent with other Enterprise tools, while the standalone is supposed to be more like CR 2008.

The standalone version mentions the following new features:
1) Read-only RPTs that can only be opened in the CR viewer
2) New XLSX export format

The enterprise version talks about:
1) A new look and feel that is more consistent with other SAP and BO tools
2) Tighter integration with the meta data layer (universe, business views, etc)
3) A translation manager that allows you to store multiple versions of the labels, each in a different language.

But there was one new feature mentioned that was mentioned in the Enterprise version that Continue Reading »
Crystal Reports 2011 coming soon

I like to stay current, but it looks like I am going to have to remove CR SP3.   Ever since I installed it I have had problems saving my customer’s reports with data, which is something I have to do all the time.   It doesn’t affect reports that I create locally, but it does affect reports from most of my customers and I haven’t been able to figure out a way around the problem.  If someone else is having this problem I would be happy to compare notes.

Here is the typical scenario.  A customer sends me a report to fix and saves it with data.  I open it, make the changes and preview the changes using the saved data.  Everything so far works fine.   But when I save the modified report and I get this message:

"Additional parameter values are needed before this
report can be saved or viewed with data.
Click 'OK' to enter the missing values"

If I click ‘OK’ it tries to refresh the report, which Continue Reading »
Crystal Reports Service Pack 3 and saved data problems