My public classes have always been offered as a 2-day Intro or a 2-day Advanced class. In September I am going to see how many students would be interested in taking a 3-day combined class.  This 3-day class, which covers the same material as both of my 4-day public classes, is my most requested class for on-site training, so it may prove popular in the classroom as well. It is ideal for:

1) Self taught students who want advanced material while “filling in the gaps” of their basic training
2) Students who already understand database concepts or have worked with another reporting tool.
3) Student who like a faster pace

This first class is going to be held September 3-5 and will cost $1,720 per student. This costs the same amount as taking the 4-days of my normal class, however the class size will be limited to 3 students. If more than 3 people are interested or if those dates don’t work for some students, I may offer another accelerated class in October.

Drop me a line if you are interested.

As I mentioned last month, the promotional price of Crystal Reports Server XI was a clear indication that CR Server 2008 was about to be released. The official release of Crystal Reports Server 2008 came on 7/16 and there is a 30 day free trial now available on the Business Objects web site.

The main improvement Continue Reading »
Crystal Reports Server 2008 (& prices)

A customer recently asked me to adapt formula 17 on my site so that they could add business hours or minutes instead of just business days. In their example they wanted to add 90 minutes to a DateTime value when a case was opened. If the DateTime was within 90 minutes of the end of the workday, they wanted to skip time when the shop was closed and pick up the 90 minutes the next business morning. So a case the opened at 4pm on Friday would be due 90 “work minutes” later, at 9:30 am on Monday. They had a 9-5 workday. They also wanted to skip holidays.

So below is my adaptation of formula 17 Continue Reading »
Adding Business Hours/Minutes to a Start DateTime

If you are used to searching the Business objects KB for CR technical info you will need to look in a new place. SAP, the new owners of Business objects, has incorporated the BO Support information (including Crystal Reports) into the SAP Support system. All links to the old support pages are forwarded to the new system’s front page, so if you have links to specific documents or KB articles, these will have to be updated.

The new location has forums, a Wiki, and other things that I haven’t really looked at yet. If you check it out and find anything interesting, let me know.

Update - according to this article, it isn’t just the KB that was moved, but the entire BO Support system, (including all support tickets) has been moved. The author of the article says that transition isn’t going very smoothly.

Gordon Portanier of Crystalize recently sent me a note about a promotional page for Crystal Reports Viewer that talks about the ability to refresh reports. That surprised him because (as my readers know) the official viewer released by BO is the ONLY viewer out there that does NOT allow you to refresh the report’s data. (There are a dozen independent viewers that allow refreshing and many other features.) So Gordon tested the BO viewer and found that it still does not allow refresh, despite the clear wording of the ad, which currently starts with the title:

“Open, View & Refresh a Crystal Report Instantly.”

I expect it to be changed soon assuming it is an error. If it is not changed soon then it could be BO intentionally trying to confuse (and annoy) their users.

Update - it was changed as of 7/14.

I mentioned recently that CR 2008 was “released”. But at that time, only the BETA was availble for download and you could only ‘preorder’ the final product. I just checked the BO website and now the full final product is available. You can do a 30 day trial or a purchase. Purchase is $495 for the full product and $295 for an upgrade.

I also checked some web software retailers but couldn’t find the product sold at any of my normal retailers. Let me know if you find it somewhere else, especially at a lower price. However, I am guessing that BO is going to set and enforce minimum prices. If I remember correctly, a recent US court ruling allows manufacturer’s to set minimum prices for their distributors and that may affect web prices on many items.

I just got a promo in my mail from Business Objects for a new product suite called “Crystal Vision”. This is actually a combination of Crystal Reports XI, Crystal Xcelsius and a third feature called “Live Office”. I am sure you all know Crystal Reports. I recently wrote an article in my newsletter describing Xcelsius which allows you build and deploy interactive flash based dashboards that read Excel data.

Live Office (which is part of BO Enterprise ) gives you Continue Reading »
Crystal Vision