Archive for October, 2024



Crystal Reports for Enterprise (CR4E) starts sunset

Tuesday 29 October 2024 @ 1:11 pm

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.




Crystal Reports 2016 support reaching ‘end of life’

Wednesday 23 October 2024 @ 3:28 pm

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.





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