We are trying to decide whether to use a mix of Crystal Reprots (CR) and WebI reports for our Data Warehouse implimentaiton, or just use WebI.
I am concerned about the user friendliness of the prompts in WebI. Mainly that they are not user friendly. If seems to me that CR is much user friendly in how it displays prompts. I want to make things as easy for the end users so there is no difficulty implimenting this release.
Does anyone have any opinions on this issue?
Is there any issue using Crystal aginst a Universe?
I can’t help but think that your best bet is to not stress about the prompts, yes Crystal is better, but rather on what the customer is going to do with the reports. If they want (or will eventually want) to modify the reports themselves and play with the data and look, then WebI is the best way to go.
That being said, the prompts in WebI are better in 4.1 then they were in previous versions so depending on your version it might change the decision a bit too.
Ethan,
We have what the customer is going to do with the data under control. We are getting feedback from the business that the WebI prompts are not user friendly and they are concerned that the business will not use them due to that reason.
I am trying to make it as easy and as user friendly as possible so that there is no excuse for not using the system.
We are on version 3.0 but are looking at the 4 upgrade in the fall. Problem with that is that it is in the middle of a release, so I am not sure what will happen with it.
Yes, there are restrictions, I would look into it.
There are also other quirks with Crystal, some good and some bad, you should investigate.
The thing about Crystal is to make sure you have the skill set for that going forward. Its more of an IT tool rather than an end business user tool.
If it was just an issue with prompts this would not be enough for me to suggest using Crystal.
10 or 15 years ago when the 20 and 30 somethings were petrified of their own workstations, I would’ve agreed that user friendly was something worth spending a lot of time on.
Nowadays, this same demographic which grew up on Facebook, Amazon, and iPads is much more adept. I tend to find that these kinds of discussions come from developers overthinking things, not business users.
In so far as prompts are concerned, to accomplish what would take me a few mintues in Designer, takes me a lot longer in Cyrstal/Business Views.
From a prompt standpoint, while you can consume prompts in Crystal from a Universe, a lot of the parameters don’t translate well.
From a report standpoint, if your users really need to slice and dice data, build formulas, apply structure, then WebI is hands down a better choice. Crystal is much more static.
Prompts are simply a piece of minutia that shouldn’t predicate your whole reporting strategy.
(BOB member since 2013-02-14)
(BOB member since 2002-06-20)
(BOB member since 2005-01-06)