Intelligent Enterprise

Better Insight for Business Decisions

RSS
Webcasts
Whitepapers
Subscribe
Home

July 18, 2003

Query, Reporting, and Analysis Products

The Bigger Picture

Don't Confuse Crystal Enterprise With Better-Known Crystal Reports

by David McAmis

Continued from Page 1

Custom Alerts

Another key enhancement is the alerting within Crystal Enterprise, which now lets you monitor alerts within reports and issue automated email notification. This feature is critical to organizations using Crystal Enterprise for KPIs or metrics. When the system sounds a predefined alert, a user (or group of users) can receive an email as well as a link back to the report's full details. Unfortunately, a large part of the alerting setup is done when you're creating or editing the report itself, which means this feature isn't as flexible as it could be.

Ad hoc reporting is also another area where Crystal Enterprise could use some additional development. The functionality has improved by leaps and bounds over the last version, but it's still difficult to create well-formatted, presentation-quality reports using the ad hoc tools. Part of the problem has to do with the nature of ad hoc reporting — allowing users to select what they want to see in a report has always been dangerous.

Advanced Management

For managing the Crystal Enterprise environment, the "Crystal Management Console" (see Figure 2) provides a Web-based administration tool you can use to manage users, groups, reports, and so on. But with some careful planning, you shouldn't have to visit the console too often. For single-sign on, Crystal Enterprise can integrate with Windows NT Security, Active Directory, and a host of LDAP providers. A robust administration API means that you can integrate your own applications or settings with Crystal Enterprise.

For creating applications for end users, developers will be pleased with the advancements made to the software development kit (SDK) for Crystal Enterprise, which now includes components for use with Visual Studio.Net, Java, and other COM platforms, as well as Crystal's own Web development language, "Crystal Server Pages." The SDK itself provides hooks into almost every area of functionality within Crystal Enterprise, but developers will find the SDK documentation frustrating.

Also, with the emphasis on .Net and Java integration, developers using other platforms (Visual Basic 6, and so on) are left out in the cold with code samples and the like. Sometimes, deciding which Crystal Enterprise component handles what function is confusing. That said, once you figure it out, you have control over the environment to view and schedule reports to a variety of formats and locations: You can export to Excel, Word, PDF, XML, and more, and distribute to email, FTP, disk, and so on.

Rate This Article

Comments:

Optional e-mail address:

Making The Leap

When you come to the chasm dividing stand-alone reporting products from enterprise reporting and distribution software, you find that a number of BI tools take the leap but never make it to the other side. Fortunately, with a robust set of features for both end users and developers, Crystal Enterprise 9 has bridged the gap and is staking its claim on enterprise reporting.

David McAmis [dmcamis@hotmail.com] is an IT consultant, journalist, author, broadcaster, and expert in business intelligence who lives and works in Sydney, Australia.