Hi. We are evaluating Business Objects's "Business Objects" Query and Analysis application tools to do analysis and create reports from our BaaN IVc3 database.

I will appreciate any comments and experiences about Business Objects + BaaN?

My questions are :

1. Are the universes really usable and useful?
2. I presume Business Objects is more useful than Crystal Reports. Is this the case?

Any comments welcome,
Regards,
Haluk Çavusoglu

IT Manager
Otoyol Sanayi A.S.

We use Business Objects with 4c3 and just recently upgraded to 4c4. I think we got some standard Baan universes, but they did require some work for us to use. Probably most of the work was because of the A&D extension. Never really worked with a full blown version of Crystal so I can not answer that question.

Mark

Thank you for the quick reply.

As far as we had checked, the current BaaN universes that had been submitted to us are prepared for an older version prior to C3. Are the universes freeware? Is it possible to get from you the copies of the universes you had been using with IVc3 or do I have to ask to Business Objects for this latest version?

Best Regards,
Haluk Cavusoglu

I would request the latest and greatest from Business Objects. Our universes have been modified for the A&D extension which would probably not work for you all. Plus we are still working on improving the universes as the user base continues to grow and we find more problems or better ways to do things. I am not sure we made any changes to the Universe when we went from 4c3 to 4c4. I do not use BusObj myself, mostly I develop in Baan.

Mark

Dear all,

Since I worked in a company that implements both Baan and Business Objects (on completely different customer sets), I can't help but digress the discussion from ERP to Business Intelligence (BI) side:
Wouldn't it be better to build a data warehouse on top of your currently running BaanIV and then run Business Objects (BO) on top of the data warehouse? Running BO directly on BaanIV, although it may work perfectly, will just make BO into a very expensive reporting tool, while you know that BO can be used for much more than that

Rgds,
Paul

Yes what you say is true. We actually use Business Objects to generate cross platform and system reports. We use it to link Baan, Autotime, AutoQuality, Financial Data, estimating and other smaller systems to create reports. I think it was originally purchased for end user reports from Baan and our Financial system - it just grew from there. I guess I just assumed(bad word) that Haluk knew all the capabilities of Business Objects.


Mark