Does anyone know of a conversion tool that is helpful in migrating Seagate Crystal 6 reports to Business Objects 5i?
We have a daunting task ahead of us (100 reports) and are looking for anything to speed this process!
Thanks,
Michelle
mthiesfeld (BOB member since 2002-08-22)
Michelle,
I looked for something like this recently and came up blank. That would be like having a tool to convert a Yugo into a Cadilac. 
MichaelWelter 
(BOB member since 2002-08-08)
Okay, thanks. I kinda figured as much.
Maybe I could use a little abra cadabra. 
~Michelle
mthiesfeld (BOB member since 2002-08-22)
The only thing you can do is to reuse the SQL code and turn the reports in to Freehand SQL.
But, you really want to be using universes. So you really can’t convert.
Steve Krandel 
(BOB member since 2002-06-25)
Hmm, now with respect to Crystal reports and Business Objects: Which one is the Yugo, and which one is the Cadillac? 
Andreas 
(BOB member since 2002-06-20)
I’ve only had a little opportunity to work with Crystal Reports, but, as you can tell, I was very underwhelmed. It’s not even in the same league with BO, especially for those of us who ocassionaly like to write freehand SQL. It’s just aweful for that. 
MichaelWelter (BOB member since 2002-08-08)
Our company is trying to make us (the finance dept) migrate from BusObj to Crystal, even though a)the licenses are more expensive, and b)we have hundreds and hundreds of BusObj reports that we’ve developed over the past five years. Crystal has a lot of nice features, esp. in the area of formulas, but it’s much less user-friendly, doesn’t allow the flexibility of variables and user-defined objects, and because it lacks the “semantic layer” of the universe, it’s more difficult to maintain data consistency between users. I will resist until they pry my mouse from my cold, dead hand . . .
jcaparula (BOB member since 2002-08-15)
Just to be fair, that goes both ways, there are things in Crystal that you can go one mile and you have to go 5 in BO.
Scott Bowers (BOB member since 2002-09-30)
This may be a bit off topic but I sat in a meeting this morning with our programmers and listened to them pick on BO for an hour because one of our users wants to write her own BO reports against operational data. The DBA cautioned about data contention issues if this report was refreshed while hundreds of students were trying to register for classes thru the web apps. That seemed to be a bit of a stretch as a read-only query is going to zip thru those rows pretty darn quick. More likely, it seems her query would be waiting for db locks, not the other way.
Then the prgrammers started talking about doing these reports in java and the assistant director, a pretty smart guy, said that if they gave him the reports she wanted, he could have his java programmers knock it out - ahem - within 3 months.
yeah, and in java, that is 2 releases away
scott copeland (BOB member since 2002-08-15)
and another big thing is the cost. What do you pay a java programmer?
Cindy Clayton (BOB member since 2002-06-11)
And what do you pay a BusObjects Developer?
I think a company has to carefully weigh the advantages/disadvantages of using a packaged solution such as BusObjects versus a in-house developed solution.
At an upcoming project my client is concerned about the cost of licensing BusObjects to over 2500 users (plus the infrastructure). Compare this to the cost of writing your own reporting interface via java etc. (with better use of resources compared to a deployment of BusObjects on a Windows platform). I am right now thinking on how many of their reporting needs we maybe could satisfy with WEbi reports instead (which will allow the servers to handle more concurrent users).
Regarding BusObjects v6/Code name Tosca:
I heard it will have a BO light process for the Windows platforms.
Can anyone chime in on it? Maybe, give some estimate numbers how many concurrent BO light serv processes a CPU under Windows will be able to handle?
Andreas (BOB member since 2002-06-20)
The biggest problem I’ve run into is that we have so much work that has been done in java and that’s the only way to retrieve those classes…that it’s quite possible my department will be doing away with Business Objects completely. Even to the point of ignoring the opportunity for using it for the things is does so well!
Eileen King (BOB member since 2002-07-10)