When Crystal Reports 2011 came out, SAP also introduced Crystal Reports for Enterprise (CR4E).  The two products would be parallel but:

“SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise is the foundation for all future releases of Crystal Reports.”

At that time most users were simply happy that the stand-alone version wasn’t being abandoned.

But CR4E never caught up with Crystal Reports (in features or usage).  According to an article I just discovered, CR4E is finally being allowed to sunset.  They are now providing instructions on how to migrate back to Crystal Reports from CR4E.

One of my customers uses Crystal Reports 2016 and wanted to buy more licenses. I recommended that they purchase licenses of Crystal Reports 2016 to keep all the environments the same. Crystal Reports 2016 is the last version that is 32-bit ODBC drivers. Crystal 2020 uses 64 bit ODBC drivers.

The customer then sent me a link showing that CR 2016 support is reaching “End of Life”.

The link says that “mainstream maintenance” ended in 2022 and “Priority One support” ends this December. They asked if this was cause for concern and I answered that it wasn’t. Few of my customers have ever needed SAP support. Many of them use even older ‘unsupported’ versions of Crystal. A few still use v8.5 from 2001, so I still have that installed on my system. The lack of SAP support has never been an issue. I haven’t upgraded to CR 2020 yet because I don’t want to recreate all my local connectivity. Also, it is interesting to note that SAP still sells CR 2016.

But, if you do need to upgrade to CR 2020 it isn’t usually a big deal. It causes the most work when users are connecting using Crystal’s DAO drivers to connect to spreadsheets and text files. There are no DAO drivers in CR 2020 so you have to connect using 64 bit ODBC drivers.

If you need some help upgrading to CR 2020 just let me know.

Adam Butt at APB reports just added a new feature to Crystal Dispatch, his ‘simple-to-use’ Crystal Reports viewer. Crystal Dispatch lets you create a shortcut for any report. Clicking that shortcut runs the report without needing to have Crystal Reports installed. After the first time you run the report it can encrypt and store your credentials.

The new features allows you to automatically export a grouped report to multiple PDFs – one per group. Each file is automatically named based on the Group Name field in the report.  This gives you a simple way to control the exported file names. The bursting happens very quickly.

If you want to try Crystal Dispatch, or any of the other viewer programs available for Crystal Reports, you can follow this link for Crystal Dispatch. To learn about all Crystal Reports viewers in more detail you can read my Viewers Comparison page.

Those of you who have been using Logicity as a report viewer or scheduler are probably aware that Logicity has reached ‘end of life’. SaberLogic (which is now Bezlio which is now Docket) has announced that they are no longer selling licenses for Logicity. Looking at the site I no longer see the ability to download the free version. Here is the official statement:

How does this affect you?
⦁ The ability to purchase licensing was removed from our website on 12/15/23.
⦁ You will not be charged for your upcoming renewal once your current subscription term completes.
⦁No renewals were processed effective 12/5/23.
⦁ Your current access and subscription is your to keep. Current Logicity access will not be affected.
⦁ Logicity support will not be available beyond your renewal date. All Logicity Support channels will be removed 12/31/24.
⦁ No product updates will be applied to the current Logicity version.

If the product is working for you then you can probably continue using it indefinitely. If you run into issues and need to switch you can read about similar products using these links:

Crystal Reports Viewers

Desktop Scheduling Engines

One of the perks of using Crystal Reports is the number of third party tools that have been developed to work with the software. My Product Links page has links to more than 70 items.

So it came as a surprise when a user pointed me to a free tool that I had never heard of. This user had asked me if there were tools that would run and export reports from the command line.  I pointed him to my ‘Viewers’ comparison page which has several options. He replied that he had decided to use Crystal Reports Helper which lets you run reports for the command line and export them to a handful of formats. Because it runs from the command line the scripts can be saved in .bat or .cmd files and run from a scheduler. It is a free tool and I had never heard of it.

Crystal Reports Helper was created by Big Ideas Computing Ltd. It was initially created for users of their software application, named dbFront. dbFront lets you quickly build simple web facing applications that allow users to enter and update data. Crystal Reports Helper has since been released it to everyone for free, all you have to do is request it from the vendor.

And thanks to Rich Head of the Greater Iowa Credit Union for sharing this link with me. I haven’t tried Crystal Reports Helper but Rich said it worked fine for him.

One of the managers at SAP recently shared a link with me that I had never seen before.   It is a comprehensive FAQ page for the Crystal Reports product family.  If looks like about 40 pages of material and covers a wide variety of topics.  (For instance, A5 has a searchable list of all the service packs and C5 links to the Knowledge Base).  Here is the outline:

A. Overview
A. 1. SAP Crystal Solutions Overview
A. 2. SAP Crystal Solutions Licensing
A. 3. SAP Crystal Solutions Hardware specs, minimum requirements, etc
A. 4. What is the numbering of versions
A. 5. SAP Crystal Solutions Service Packs
A. 6. SAP Crystal Solutions Product versions
A. 7. SAP Crystal Solutions Maintenance and Support
A. 8. SAP Crystal Solutions compatibility

B. Purchase
B. 1. SAP Store purchase
What versions of SAP Crystal Reports are available through the SAP Store?
What versions of SAP Crystal Server are available through the SAP Store?
SAP CR 2020 and SAP CR 2016 available on selected 3rd party marketplaces.
B. 2. SAP Store additional questions
B. 3. SAP Store Upgrades
B. 4. SAP Store Order Fulfillment
B. 5. End User license agreements (EULA)

C. Installation
C. 1. SAP Crystal Solutions Installation
C. 2. Lost license keys and registration numbers
C. 3. SAP Crystal Solutions How-to Guides
C. 4. SAP Crystal Solutions Videos and Tutorials
C. 5. SAP Crystal Solutions Guided Answers and KBAs
C. 6. SAP Crystal Solutions Third Party Training and Consulting

D. Developers
D. 1. SAP Crystal for Developers
D. 2. Retirement of the SAP Distribution Reselling and PartnerEdge Open Ecosystem

E. Error and Issues Handling
E. 1. SAP Crystal Solutions product tips and tricks
E. 2. Vulnerabilities

F. Other topics
F. 1. SAP Crystal Solutions Third Party Apps
F. 2. Ask your own question
F. 3. Recruitment with SAP Crystal skills

Some of the links in this FAQ, like the link to the knowledge base search, require an SAP “Universal ID” to get full access.  These are free.

There are many ways to deploy Crystal Reports to users. I normally lean toward the simpler and less expensive options, like locally installed viewers, or scheduled delivery of PDF output. But there are environments where a web based option is necessary. The “official” options from SAP are Crystal (Reports) Server and BO Enterprise. But there are other, less expensive products out there that also provide web delivery of Crystal Reports. These third party products allow your users to run and view reports from a browser. You can also centrally manage your report deployment from a browser.

I have created a page on my blog that lists and compares these products, and I update it every Winter with info from the vendors. This year the list features 8 products:

Crystal Reports Server – a traditional Web portal
Report Runner Web Portal – a traditional Web portal
IntelliFront BI – a traditional Web portal
Ripplestone – a traditional Web portal
rePORTAL CR – a traditional Web portal
ReCrystallize Server – a traditional Web portal
ReCrystallize Pro – a launch page generator for the web
Bezlio – a SaaS Web viewer

The blog page mentioned above contains a brief rundown on what each product does and provides links to all of the product web sites. I have also posted a feature matrix (xls) that shows some of the specifics for comparison, including prices.

If you have any feedback to share on these tools I would be happy to hear from you.

Everyone has been talking about the new Java security vulnerability called Log4j. I have been talking to colleagues to determine if this affects Crystal Reports, Crystal Enterprise or anything else in the Crystal ecosystem. SAP put out a note that states that this vulnerability does not affect SAP Business Intelligence 4.2 or 4.3. It doesn’t mention earlier BI versions but these are no longer supported.

There was a support note about this topic, but nothing in the support note mentions Crystal Reports or the Crystal runtime engine used by third party applications. One of my colleagues said that since this is a Java vulnerability, it should not affect stand alone Crystal Reports, and I tend to agree. I also believe that if Crystal Reports were affected it would be mentioned in that support note. The same goes for the Crystal runtime files, but it would be nice if SAP responded specifically to these questions in the discussion above.

Last, thanks to Andrew Baines of Pursuit Technology and Danny Shahrabani of rePORTAL Software for helping me track down and make sense of the SAP support note.  If anyone else has info to share on this topic, please let me know.