The future of BusinessObjects Crystal Reports is two-pronged, and each option offers different messages for users of the popular software. Crystal Reports 2011, part of the BusinessObjects BI 4.0 release that may be coming as soon as July 2011, mirrors the features in Crystal Reports 2008 for the most part. “Not much has really changed,” said Coy W. Yonce, III, a product manager for SAP Crystal Reports, who spoke during an SAP Web event about Crystal on June 22, 2011. However, the new Crystal Reports for Enterprise offers sweeping, albeit incomplete, changes to the software and acts as a forerunner of things to come, according to information presented by Yonce.  

Important Points to Take Away

  So what does it all mean for users and administrators? If they remain happy with the features in Crystal Reports 2008, they can steer clear of Crystal Reports for Enterprise for now – and they probably don’t need Crystal Reports 2011, either. That’s because Crystal Reports 2011’s biggest role seems to be as a bridge between the old and the new, on the one hand offering a familiar approach as seen in Crystal Reports 2008, while on the other hand laying the cornerstone for significant revisions coming in Crystal Reports for Enterprise and beyond. But for users who long for better design and more intuitive functions, Crystal Reports for Enterprise is winking at them, with a promise that most of the good stuff is coming later. The similarities to Crystal Reports 2008 and 2011 are such that it’s hard to imagine the motivation for upgrading to the new release, short of a company insisting that its workers migrate to BusinessObjects 4.0. Among the only truly new features in Crystal Reports 2011 compared to Crystal Reports 2008 are the addition of a read-only report format and the new ability to export data to Microsoft Office 2007 Excel.  

Enterprise Release Shifts Crystal’s Approach

  Crystal Reports for Enterprise is where things start to get interesting. Working off the notion that end-users should be able to interact easily with the data with minimal learning time, “we have completely redesigned the UI,” Yonce said. The new UI takes advantage of tabbed layouts and offers features to manage groups and sorts from a single location in the UI. This version also relies on the common semantic layer (i.e., universes) to provide one version of metadata logic. Simply put, Crystal Reports for Enterprise looks and acts more modern than its predecessors. “This is a paradigm shift for traditional Crystal users [who are] used to physically defining the database connections and having more free-form SQL,” said Don Loden, principal consultant for business intelligence at Decision First Technologies, Inc., in Atlanta, GA. Users of Crystal Reports XI.3 or 2008 may express, at least initially, a preference to keep doing things with the software as they always have in the past, said Loden, who is also an editorial advisor for BusinessObjects Expert. However, there are strengths in the early approach of Crystal Reports for Enterprise in terms of user experience, which is attractive to users, he added.  

The End Goal is a 2012 Release

  SAP is putting emphasis on Crystal Reports for Enterprise and its expected updates, all which will likely culminate in the future release of Crystal Reports 2012, Yonce said. Crystal 2011 will tentatively phase out with the 2012 release, and the latter version will support most of the features in Crystal 2008 and 2011, he said. Until then, however, Crystal Reports for Enterprise resembles a sleek restaurant with a limited menu. For reasons Yonce did not make clear during his presentation, SAP felt it needed to release Crystal Reports for Enterprise to reflect some upcoming BusinessObjects BI 4.0 improvements, but couldn’t fit in every feature that is already available in Crystal Reports 2008 or 2011. For example, Crystal Reports for Enterprise limits the sources you can connect to when creating a report, while Crystal Reports 2011 has more options, Yonce said. Asked about a release without full functionality, Loden said that could be a hard point for SAP to sell initially to some in the BusinessObjects community. However, he reiterated that the full slate of features coming to the revamped Crystal Reports software will interest many users eventually.