A few weeks ago I saw the Office Integration (Baan <---> Word / Excel). It looked very good to me.
Has anyone have some experience with this product?

Greetings, Nick

I too am interested in Office Integration. I've heard rumors of problems setting up the client - does anyone have any experience with this? Any advice would be appreciated.

Regards,

Marc

We tried instalation of MSO Integration on different platforms. On 2000 was ok, on 98 we faced problems, that are quite different from machine to machine. First problem was, start of Baan Automation Server- with some machine we recived error "BAS can not connect to Baan". Next was "NTUtilities not installed" and "setup.exe could not be found". But at the end we managed to start corectly and it seem to be a very good tool for creating reports. There is also posibilty to write back to baan from Excel-but you can not add new records.

slavko:

I'm puzzled why you can't create new records from Excel. Was any reason given for why that didn't work. I would think that it ought to be possible.

As just a reporting tool, would you see benefits over something like Crystal Reports?

Thanks for the information,

Marc

Originally posted by Marc S
slavko:

I'm puzzled why you can't create new records from Excel. Was any reason given for why that didn't work. I would think that it ought to be possible.

As just a reporting tool, would you see benefits over something like Crystal Reports?

Thanks for the information,

Marc

There is a way to add records, but it is a bit "unusual". While our Baan table was empty (you can found empty one for sure and try), adding of records did not work. After inserting some records from Baan to that table, we were able to add records also from Excel, but on top of grid.

In the moment, it is hard to compare to CR, but it is already clear, that MSO Integration gives you similar capabilities in making reports like CR, everyone can do it (you just need to do a proper structuring of report) and there is also SW price issue.

Best reg's

Slavko

HI All,
You can really do some cool integrations between the office applications and baan using iBaan OpenWorld. It will allow u to create as well as view data from/in baan.

Regards
Sudhir Hasbe
e-Emphasys Technologies

Crystal Reports is quicker. They have already mapped the formulas into their reports. Due to budget constrains, we could not afford buying enough copies of CR and opted to try Baan Office Integration. It pulls data very slowly, but it works. We didn't have the same problems I've seen posted in this forum -- consultants from NextStep got it set up for us, so we hit the ground running.

The two difficulties I have had in setting up Finance reports are that I have to rely on our Finance staff to give me the formulas so that I can develop the reports, and that expertise is sometimes hard to find. The other difficulty is that Baan abandons support on this product. I have put in over 10 support requests and have only gotten adequate response on one or two.

Last year, an IBM contractor had developed and passed on a manufacturing report that pulled Baan data using visual basic, not BOI. It runs much faster than BOI.