As much as has been already talked about Crystal 10 licensing issues, there are still a lot of apprehensions before suggesting an upgrade to Crystal 10 for organizations. I did some ground work on this issue to suggest Crystal upgrade in my company and I thought I will lay down my case in this forum -
first - to help people who are starting to think of upgrading/migrating to Crystal 10.
second - to get help/assurances from the experts here that it is/is not - the way to go
This is my case.
We are currently using Crystal 8.5 in about 6 small applications for different departments of our company.
The applications are either
1. Thick clients using VB-RDC
2. Compiled Reports accessed through a terminal server.
3. Compiled Reports accessed directly.
All these reports pull in real time data.
If we have to upgrade to Crystal 10, I guess the VB-RDC applications can be directly upgraded but the compiled reports would have to either change to either VB-RDC technology or Web reports. Personally, I like the web reports option better-technology wise.
My company is only 200 strong probably only about 10-15 people would be actually using the web reports on a daily basis - real time (though not concurrent). The users for the VB-RDC application would be another 12-15 people but they are from a different department.
The $20K + price tag on the CE full processor license is too much for my company as there are only a very few users. So I was thinking of buying Advanced Developer Edition and use Crystal Enterprise Embedded for the web reports ( to convert the Compiled reports. I am thinking of retaining VB-RDC applciation as such.)
I guess CE Embedded allows 3 concurrent connections and the rest would be queued up, which is fine as long as it does not take a whole lot of time to come up. Also CE Embedded licensing only talks about a single standalone server deployment and nothing about named Users License. This would mean that as long as all my web reports are hosted on a single machine - any number of users can connect to them -with the 3 concurrent users and the rest queued up option.
The licensing document says that CE Professional- Introductory license is limited to five named users - I am not sure whether this will be needed at all in my case - when I am already using CE Embedded.
Terminal server issue- Some of my users access compiled reports over the terminal server-and licensing document suggests that it should be a single standalone deployment with five named user license. On talking to Crystal I found that this is true only if the reporting server is the same as the terminal server. But if are they different the 5 named user license is not a problem.
So based on all these things, I think I should suggest Crystal Enterprise Advance Edition - Not sure how the result/performance would be though - Got to actually implement the solution to find out.
Meanwhile I am also investigating about SQL Server Reproting Services for web reports - what with all the fuss Crystal makes over web reporting.
So...Any comments/ideas?
first - to help people who are starting to think of upgrading/migrating to Crystal 10.
second - to get help/assurances from the experts here that it is/is not - the way to go
This is my case.
We are currently using Crystal 8.5 in about 6 small applications for different departments of our company.
The applications are either
1. Thick clients using VB-RDC
2. Compiled Reports accessed through a terminal server.
3. Compiled Reports accessed directly.
All these reports pull in real time data.
If we have to upgrade to Crystal 10, I guess the VB-RDC applications can be directly upgraded but the compiled reports would have to either change to either VB-RDC technology or Web reports. Personally, I like the web reports option better-technology wise.
My company is only 200 strong probably only about 10-15 people would be actually using the web reports on a daily basis - real time (though not concurrent). The users for the VB-RDC application would be another 12-15 people but they are from a different department.
The $20K + price tag on the CE full processor license is too much for my company as there are only a very few users. So I was thinking of buying Advanced Developer Edition and use Crystal Enterprise Embedded for the web reports ( to convert the Compiled reports. I am thinking of retaining VB-RDC applciation as such.)
I guess CE Embedded allows 3 concurrent connections and the rest would be queued up, which is fine as long as it does not take a whole lot of time to come up. Also CE Embedded licensing only talks about a single standalone server deployment and nothing about named Users License. This would mean that as long as all my web reports are hosted on a single machine - any number of users can connect to them -with the 3 concurrent users and the rest queued up option.
The licensing document says that CE Professional- Introductory license is limited to five named users - I am not sure whether this will be needed at all in my case - when I am already using CE Embedded.
Terminal server issue- Some of my users access compiled reports over the terminal server-and licensing document suggests that it should be a single standalone deployment with five named user license. On talking to Crystal I found that this is true only if the reporting server is the same as the terminal server. But if are they different the 5 named user license is not a problem.
So based on all these things, I think I should suggest Crystal Enterprise Advance Edition - Not sure how the result/performance would be though - Got to actually implement the solution to find out.
Meanwhile I am also investigating about SQL Server Reproting Services for web reports - what with all the fuss Crystal makes over web reporting.
So...Any comments/ideas?