We are looking at various report writers. We have Safari, and have been very unhappy with it. We have used Access, and the users do not care for it.

We are currently looking at Crystal and Business Objects. The users seem to like Business Objects more than Crystal, but we have been unable to find another Baan installation using it.

Administration is very similar to Crystal, from what I can tell, but the pricetag is kind of steep.

Has anybody else heard of them, and are actually using them?

Thanks

Maybe I am being rather naive here, but what are the benefits of using a third party report writer? Surely it is possible to develop new Baan reports and customize existing ones to produce any reports that users require? Why buy a third party product at all?:eek:

Business Objects has a set of baan rapid deployment template which is a baan2b. If your using b4c4 you can enhance the rdt for your usage. Depending on the type of query your end user is executing, there would be a significant performance issue.
Nevertheless building a datawarehouse for your Baan is a more long term solution.


Best Wishes,
Zaid

What about Business Objects and Baan 5? I understand that there are not any RDT's very 5c. Do the RDT's really make that much of a difference? We have reports written in Safari:mad: , Access:( , and Crystal :confused: . We are also migrating to Baan 5 (starting the project 9/10), so this is the time to change the report writer. As we may have some reports that we will no longer need (assuming that there are more "canned reports" inside 5c :rolleyes: ), we are prepared to re-write the ones we do need. Without the RDT's, will we be able to accomplish it with Business Objects?

Safari is out, and Crystal has the drivers that integrate with 5c. however, we are currently on IVb2, and Crystal does not have drivers for IVb2.

We just want to make the right choice as we move forward, and have received mixed reviews on Crystal and Business Objects.

I'm not aware of new RDTs for Baan, you might want to check with your local BO vendors. Without RDTs you can still create your universe in Business Objects. I believe BO is a better choice. We have used Crystal Reports b4 but move on to BO due to ease of use, coding , deployment to power end-users to generate their own reports, etc.

You've got to get to know it to fell in love with it..


Best Wishes,
Zaid

Hi,

just a report writer won't do it anymore. You will need to look ahead. Crystal's report writer is just that. Business Objects is not really a report writer. I guess the guys at BO might get offended calling them that :p

Business Objects is a player in the so called Business Intelligence market. There is a focus on offering as much information to your employees as possible and it a simple way. Currently the bigger analytics guys like BO, Cognos, MicroStrategy and slowly Crystal are all trying to get a piece of that market. They offer tools to create reports, OLAP cubes, data warehouse, extract data from your systems etc. Since you are changing your Baan system at the time it is the right time to start looking, but be warned that these products are big and require a good amount of implementationt time to get yoru data marts etc. defined properly. Also note that not many of them do have knowledge about the Baan systems. E.g. BO is marketing a full solution with their deployement kits, but as posted it might not cover your latest version.

Also note that these products allow your user to analyze information from the Baan system. It will reduce the 'report' workload on your existing IT staff, since you give more freedom to the user to browse around instead of having to ask for information.

Crystal seems to be the favorite report writer at the moment and pops up at many sites I have visited the last 2 years. I heard rumors that they will provide some reporting for Baan 5c, so don't bet on this version to cover all your report needs.

If you are interested in trying something around Business Intelligence offering real OLAP and real-time data access to your Baan data through a web browser without the use of extra Baan licenses then you can also check out www.eoscene.com.
If you are just looking for a report writer, then I would stick with Crystal, they have the better connection to the Baan system and are reasonably priced. Buying a product like BO is overkill for just reporting.

Arean.

Hello Jeff,

You should consider Croko Reporter instead of Safari, Crystal or business objects.
You have all capabilities of crystal, since it uses the layout techniques of crystal, plus reporting capabilities to Access, Excel and Brioquery.
Plus, it will create the queries in Baan much easier because the data dictionary of baan is available in Croko, so the sql generator knows the available table relations!

You will also like the price tag!
Croko can be used on any Baan or Triton version since Triton 3!

For a demo CD mail me your mail address at hdkok@quadriceps.nl

Hi Jeff

I would strongly recommend Crystal for reports. They access the data dictionary of BaaN so know the complete table structure.
Because of their native BaaN Driver, security is managed from within the BaaN Tools package just like you would manage any other BaaN security.
Crystal have the ability to report across companies.
Finally they have the ability to allow the user to run a report from within BaaN and have this report formatted by Crystal. This is a huge benefit as the user does not have to come out of BaaN to run the report and any information (order status update etc.) is updated becase the report is run from within BaaN.

:p
Crystal

It seems Crystal Reports or its ODBC drivers has 2 annoying flaws:
it needs database synonyms to recognize Baan tables as it does not understand the BAAN.<table_name> denomination
it can only 'read' a limited number of tables names when trying to list them, ie. trying to get all Baan tables from 3,4 different Baan companies (>5000 tables) seems to be impossible

Anybody any experience with that?

We are just starting with Crystal Reports and have had no huge problems (yet) but I agree with Pat's comments re listing tables. It can be quite annoying!

We have decided to go with Crystal. Although Business Objects is a better tool business tool, we made the decision based on report writing alone. Based on the dollars required, it made more sense to go with Crystal.

Thans for all of the advice on this... wish us luck.

Jeff

We have also run into the problem with a limit to the number of Baan tables Crystal will recognize. We found that when using the "free" version of the Baan Native Driver, tables to be accessed by Crystal could not be listed using the wild card in your tabledef6.1 file. Apparently, Baan has a limit of approximately 2000 entries in this file.

According to Crystal Decisions their current version of the Baan Native Driver will allow use of wild cards. This version must be purchased. Does anyone have experience with this version of the Baan Native Driver and Crystal Reports? I'd like to know that we can access all Baan tables from Crystal Reports before we purchase the product. We're currently using Oracle 8.0.6 for our database.

In terms of usability, Crystal is a very nice report writer. If you buy Crystal for Baan there are a limited number of standard reports that are quite useful (trial balance in finance for example). If you have the wrong version, you can manually update them fairly easily.
The major problem I have found is in the table joins (left hand, right hand joins etc). Although I have been told some Visual Basic tampering can sort it, I have not solved the following problems:
1. If a table join cannot find a match, the report drops the record.
2. If it finds more than one match, you get duplication.
Has anyone found this as well, and found the solution?
(We use Crystal v7 and Baan 5.0c)

I am trying to find out more information about the available "free" Crytal/Baan report drivers. Where are they available?

Hi there, :cool:

As every Safari user I know one thing about it: it kills my server! :(
Safari is usles as it works own data dictonary. It is using only one index, and I can keep continuing this for long time.
At my company (50 BaaN users), we found solution for Safari-plague. Tool is called GunTier. My boss wrote it.
It works very simply: you write some SQL, Excel of any other Object orientet thing pases this SQL DIRECT to ORACLE (or any other DB). and You get your data in no time back in Excel. From ther You my distribut it as You like.
easy and fast.
Any intersts? :p

kind regards
Darek Newecki
darek.newecki@pluma.be
IT department

I was at BWU last week and nearly everyone I spoke to was using Crystal and were happy with the results. It works better then Safari ever did. The solution Crystal proposes actually uses the Baan dictionary - no duplication, no additional management.

The latest version of the solution actually allows you to print all your Baan reports in Crystal format, which then allows you to modify them using Crystal - add charts, highlights, grouping, etc. Pretty cool stuff - they demoed it at BWU.

Hi there,

I do not know how Cristal works. But I know our raport writer kost far less than this expensive tool. And it is damn fast.
Our tool is working directly on Oracle, SQL or anything else.
I You like we can compare... ;-)

Originally posted by wunschbr
I am trying to find out more information about the available "free" Crytal/Baan report drivers. Where are they available?

The Crystal / Baan driver was available for a short time as a free beta release in 1999, but has since been released into a full production version and is no longer free. The current version out is 2.0 and includes integration with Baan such that any Baan report can be outputed into Crystal format. The price is very reasonable and includes full support. It is intended only for Baan IVc and Baan V systems. You can purchase it through Baan, or directly from Crystal Decisions. It is called Crystal Enterprise Solutions for Baan. We've been using it since its beta release and have been very satisfied with it.

www.crystaldecisions.com

Originally posted by patvdv
It seems Crystal Reports or its ODBC drivers has 2 annoying flaws:
it needs database synonyms to recognize Baan tables as it does not understand the BAAN.<table_name> denomination
it can only 'read' a limited number of tables names when trying to list them, ie. trying to get all Baan tables from 3,4 different Baan companies (>5000 tables) seems to be impossible

Anybody any experience with that?

I'm addressing this from an Oracle point of view:

Its not Crystal and its ODBC drivers that is a problem. Even the Oracle ODBC driver can't pull in all of the tables from a Baan / Oracle DB. I have Crystal and if you use the ODBC connectivity, they give you a filtering option which allows you to specify the tables you want, but its still within the limit that can be displayed. I found this to be the case before I had Crystal and had played with ODBC and Excel. In fact the large number tables and indexes that exist under Baan cause major performance problems with most GUI database admin tools too. From what I've seen, Oracle doesn't seem too eager to remedy this issue. I'd be happy to talk to you further about this if you'd like.

Using their Baan driver eliminates the problem of excessive table listings because they only display the tables that fall under a typical company definition set. Cross-company access is achieved using the Baan psuedo-field "_compnr" which their driver provides access to.

With our tool You can get any of tabels from Oracle. only one thing that is important is to know the name of table.
If You like it to send data to Excel You will be restricted by Excels capacityies.

Originally posted by plumanv
With our tool You can get any of tabels from Oracle. only one thing that is important is to know the name of table.
If You like it to send data to Excel You will be restricted by Excels capacityies.

With Crystal and ODBC you can also get any table(s) in Oracle and you are not restricted to Excel's capabilities. Once you get your report output in a form you like in Crystal, you then have the option to export the output to any of a number of formats like Excel, Word, Adobe, etc., and it also has the ablity to directly load it into an Oracle table too.

hey I am talking about almost FREE tool! no that big money involved and it kicks ass! I used excel as example. You can get data from ORACLE of other DB and put it in ANY objectoriented aplication. :D

I have two clients who have purchased Crystal. Both would agree with you that the price is high. However they want the functionality and ability to write their own reports in something other than Baan Tools. Additionally they are using Crystal to amek reports available over secure web connections.

Do understand that you will have to either develop or hire (or rent) a Crystal Report skill set. We have a set of standard reports we use in getting people up and runnig as part of our Business Intelligence offering. When you shop be sure to ask if other support organizations can come in with something similar.

Stephen Ruger
Lodestar Consultilng
215-785-6756
sr@mylodestar.com

We have tried several different approaches to this problem.
We have used crystal and found it to be a tough go, easy to develop, hard to maintain / deploy / performance issues.

We are currently looking at deploying :
1) Cognos
2) Business Objects
3) Baan's Decision Manager

Our users want ad-hoc / drill down ability, and so using an OLAP tool hocked to a small datawarehouse seems like the way to go. These products are expensive, but they can do a lot more than either customized reports in baan or crystal reports.

Has anyone used cognos & baan together or the decision manager ?

John

I have been using Crystal with Baan for a about 4 years and I personally find it the best reporting tool that I've used. By purchasing the Baan Native Driver all the conversions of the enumerated and encrypted fields is completed for you. If using Crystal externally with no native driver of course you have to use SQL for all these conversions or iBaan is suppose to be a great solution.

We're using Crystal Enterpise 8.5/Crystal Reports 8.5 with Baan IVc4. That works great if you're interested in reporting. The drill down option in reports that you made and published on the Enterpise (web) is a great improvement over the standard reports from Baan. Also we have no problem in using wildcards when selecting tables. Via the native driver you get all the tables (except toolstables).

We'va also looked at BO. Is more a BI tool than CE is. In CE as a user you cannot do anything with the reports, except print them and drill down. In BO you can do lots of things with the reports (sort, replace fields, make subselections, etc.). So every report is sort of like a cube, while the reports from CE are reports.

Hope this helps.

JWW
:p

Been using Crystal for a number of years, and find it very useful for 'traditional' reporting functions. It does have some serious limitations, but then doesn't every product; you just have to recognise what they are, and work within them. A decision hads been made to implement Microstrategy (Initial cubes for sales set up already). I am about to be trained, but have some misgivings, as it seems rather a large(expensive) hammer to crack a small (300 users max, only a small proportion of whom use ERP reporting) nut!