Does anyone have experience with Actuate? There are rumors flying that another business unit in our company is using it and we may be asked to as well. Any pros or cons? Feel free to contact me off list if this is inappropriate for online discussion. Thanks,
Joanne
Listserv Archives (BOB member since 2002-06-25)
One of our business units uses Actuate. I understand there are a number of problems with it.
In particular, all report requests or changes have to be done by IT due to the complexity of the
product, although the latest version of the software is supposed to make it more feasible for
end users to create reports.
cheers, Nick
Listserv Archives (BOB member since 2002-06-25)
2 different products. Actuate is not an OLAP tool. It is a reporting tool that excels at distributing reports and scaling to 100’s, even thousands of users.
If you need OLAP capabilities - BO.
If you want to distribute reports to 1000’s of users - Actuate.
Louis
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2001 08:00:33 -0500
Does anyone have experience with Actuate? There are rumors flying that another business unit in our company is using it and we may be asked to as well. Any pros or cons? Feel free to contact me off list if this is inappropriate for online discussion. Thanks,
Joanne
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Listserv Archives (BOB member since 2002-06-25)
Hello, Joanne.
The idea behind BO is to offer mainstream end users a reporting tool that is easy to use. Actuate is a very good at “production” reports; at the deployment and distribution of hundreds of standard reports. But Actuate is a complicated tool to use, especially for mainstream end users. Companies with Actuate do not typically deviate from a set of standard reports, and when they do, a backlog of reports can quickly grow, since only I.T. staff and/or good power users are capable of creating Actuate reports. The idea behind BO is to offload as much work as possible from the I.T. staff by giving users an easy and capable reporting tool.
I hope this helps,
Luis Gonzalez
Listserv Archives (BOB member since 2002-06-25)
We’ve also got both of these products inhouse and as was dicussed earlier, the biggest difference is Actuate is more of an industrial strength report generator that your IT department will have to do all the developing. Business Objects is more of a decision support tool that endusers can produce their own reports.
Our architecture breaks this space out as: 1) reportwriters (Actuate, Crystal, etc) 2) decision/support tools (Bobj, Cognos, etc) 3) olap tools (Essbase, etc)
I’d be interested in how other organizations architect these fine lines. Also interested in other organizations that run both Actuate and Business Objects in the same shop and how they manage the two together. Thanks
Chris Pohl
Mellon Bank
From: Joanne Casteel [SMTP:Joanne.Casteel@TRX.COM]
Does anyone have experience with Actuate? There are rumors flying that another business unit in our company is using it and we may be asked to as well. Any pros or cons? Feel free to contact me off list if this is inappropriate for online discussion.
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Listserv Archives (BOB member since 2002-06-25)
Can some body post the comparison between Actuate 7 and Crystal Reports XI? please post it to my mail at yerraprs@mail.nih.gov or satyasuman_21@yahoo.co.in. I appreciate your responses. Please try to send me the comparison in table format( Really helpful ).
THank you,
satya.
[Moderator Edit: If anybody has such a comparison, please do NOT send a private email message. Instead, please post here.]
crystal (BOB member since 2006-04-24)
Hi,
We are planning to migrate from Actuates to Business Objects. It will be useful if you can share some Migration Case Studies or some document with details on approach taken for migration.
Please help!!
Thanks,
bodevXI
bodevXI (BOB member since 2006-05-09)
It is unlikely such a document exists. You would be best making a start in a test environment and seeing how you get on. If you then have specific questions e.g. ‘The Actuate report does this, how do I do it in BO’ we are the people to ask.
Nick Daniels 
(BOB member since 2002-08-15)
You could contact SAP directly. Are you in contact with SAP sales? Have you purchased SAP BusObjects licenses already? How large is your deployment (number of users)?
Andreas 
(BOB member since 2002-06-20)
I have experience of both tools and agree with most of the previous posts. Actuate is definitely a tool which becomes IT intensive very rapidly - the vast majority of users are not going to be able to create meaningful or even vaguely complex reports - that task will inevitably fall to either the IT departments (never a popular choice) or a selection of power users (which sounds like an nice idea but often doesn’t work in practice).
Not a bad tool for what it is, but it operates on a different level than BusinessObjects.
BOXI Balboa (BOB member since 2007-01-24)
We have Actuate at my previous job. Actuate is a report development tool that is very similar to Crystal Report, but not as good as Crystal. It’s storage system is file-based, just like BusinessObjects XI’s FRS repository structure, but a lot easier to manipulate than XI. The last I heard, Actuate is going open-source to try to stay alive.
Migrating from Actuate to Crystal may not be simple. You might have to rebuild all the reports from the ground up. The good news is that their structure is similar. But off the top of my head, I don’t remember Actuate having an equivalent tool as the Universe. Since you are rebuilding the reports from the ground up, I strongly suggest you to use Universe instead of pointing the report directly to the database tables.
substring 
(BOB member since 2004-01-16)
Hi All,
Thanks for all the valuable inputs. Our clients are yet to decide on the tool to which they want to migrate from Actuate.
Will come up with more questions once the migration work starts up.
Thanks!
bodevXI
bodevXI (BOB member since 2006-05-09)
Err , sorry to say that but you all lack knowledge on Actuate Products.
Everybody seem to have used Actuate7 ( 2001 !!! ) and Actuate products GREATLY improved since.
Here’s a fresh 2009 update for Actuate V10 :
Actuate now has BIRT. This is the most wide adopted OPEN SOURCE Reporting tool. For basic usage as any Open source reporting tool it’s free. Now if you want your BIRT reports on Actuate iServer , it’s commercial offering.
Still is has NOTHING to do with Business Objects pricing ( less expensive ) and has much more graphical capabilities and flexibility ( XML designs ).
Actuate now has BIRT Interactive Viewer and Report Studio. These are purely Ajax Web Reporting for Business Users. I have seen BIRT Report Studio to successfully REPLACE Web Intelligence on 5000 users project.
Actuate now has Information Objects. This is a pure XML metadata Layer very much like a Universe …except it’s MULTISOURCE. Meaning you can integrate data from multiple databases , files , web services etc. in the SAME metadata object. Therefore this tool also does Data Federation ( EII ) and Query parralelisation. Finally this tool has a Caching ability ( basically you can cache the data behind your metadata ).
This metadata layer also provides Impact Analysis ( If i change that field in my DB which reports are impacted? ) , Query profiler ( How is my dynamic SQL optimized and sent to various DB? ) etc etc etc.
All these products are now in Actuate Product Range for years.
Most of all , Actuate is not open source today to try to stay alive. Actuate is open source today because it’s BETTER than traditional commercial software. Even Gartner ( sponsorised by Business Objects ) recognized OSBI in the latest study as un upcoming trend on the BI market.
Thank you.
[Moderator note - sale-centric information removed]
actuatebirt (BOB member since 2009-11-03)
How do you know we “all” lack knowledge? That was a discourteous attitude.
BTW, welcome to BOB. 
zack (BOB member since 2007-08-02)
Hardly surprising no ones touting themeselves as all knowing in Actuate in a Business Objects forum.
Anyway good luck with the sales
dessa 
(BOB member since 2004-01-29)
Would there be any money in me learning this Actuate thingummy?
I’m not seeing any jobs in it.
Damocles (BOB member since 2006-10-05)
There may be a lot related to sales 
zack (BOB member since 2007-08-02)
Speaking of a solution you used X years ago without even paying a visit to the website means lack of knowledge. This might be a bit discourteos, but it IS biaised to compare BO XI R3.2 to Actuate 7.
I would never dare to speak of a comparison between Actuate10 and Business Objects 6 for instance. 
As for the jobs , search BIRT. i’m sure you’ll be happy with the number of jobs result.
And , yes i know i’m on BO forum. But you know , OTHER solutions exist and might be just better. FYI i have certification in BO as well and i happen to also know its many limitations.
Have fun,
Kind regards,
actuatebirt (BOB member since 2009-11-03)
Every tool has its own pros and cons. According to me, using a right tool for a right job is what matters.
Jansi 
(BOB member since 2008-05-12)
I have worked on Actuate 8 fix 6 for almost 15 months, and have handled its iServer/active portal and other admin parts too but there is nothing like BO in this world (this is my personal thinking)…infact i changed my job to shift from Actuate to BO…again every pdt has its positives and negatives.Some clients do prefer Actuate for cost effectiveness.
RBO (BOB member since 2006-08-26)