There is an article on ITDirector.com that has excerpts of a comparison of the two companies. I found it fun to read. My favorite quotes:

1) “Cognos likes to build exciting new products to satisfy customer needs. Business Objects likes to squeeze every last bit of profit out of its existing product set, and then acquire to gain fast entry to an emerging market…”

2) But on the other hand, “Business Objects has the best Query and Reporting available today. Period.”

Read the full article [dead link] and tell me what you think

According to CBROnline.com (and several other sources) Business Objects has signed a strategic alliance with IBM. This brings BO’s relationship with IBM to the same level as that of Cognos and SAS who have had similar deals for some time. This will help BO penetrate several new areas in the global market and also help them penetrate the mid-market companies where IBM has a solid presence.

Crystal Reports introduced Command objects starting in v9. They allow you to write your own SQL to generate the data for a report. You can even add parameters that allow you to replace text directly in the SQL at runtime.

Dynamic parameters were introduced in v11. They allow the parameter pick-list to be generated by a database query at runtime. However, if you change a command parameter to be dynamic you will get some funny behavior, at least in XI Release 1. Continue Reading »
Command with Dynamic Parameter

If you are using or considering ZetaFax to distribute Crystal Reports then be aware that ZetaFax seems to have issues with the newer versions of Crystal. I found several postings from people who upgraded Crystal from 8.5 to a later version and found that ZetaFax no longer could read the embedded fax number tags in the report. No one knows for sure why but it appears to be related to the Unicode compliant characters used by Crystal starting with v9. I asked the folks at ZetaFax Continue Reading »
Crystal Reports and ZetaFax don’t play well together anymore

( Update 7/2013 – this has been discontinued)

Barry Walter has just released a tool to help Crystal Reports developers organize and explore their reports. It automatically extracts and stores all of the database connections, tables, joins and even the formulas used in all of your reports. You can then select any connection, table or field to see which reports use that object. Continue Reading »
New Data Dictionary Builder for Crystal Reports

(This vendor no longer offers Crystal Reports file recovery)

A user recently sent me a Crystal Reports file that seemed to be corrupted. Every time he tried to open it Crystal would crash. I tried it myself using several versions of Crystal and got the same results. I told him that there was no way I knew of to recover the file and hoped that he had a backup of an older version. He didn’t, and the report represented several weeks of work. Lesson number one. Keep some interim backups.

But, later that same day he told me that he found a company that was able to recover the file. Continue Reading »
Recovery of corrupted RPT files