Xlbo, I can understand your point of view, complaining doesn't make things any better. But this sort of discussion is exactly what's so needed when evaluating a product!
It appears that BO intends to let Crystal wither on the vine. This means that a migration to RS for many companies will be inevitable. But the question is "When do we want to make the jump?" The only way to find out the worth of a product is to tear into things and see what it can do. Companies can run for several years with a product even if it is abandonware, only taking the upgrade plunge when the new solution has sufficiently matured.
As an example, the company I am with is wedded to a third-party customer management system. Management loves the complexity of the system, gathering and massaging data in ways the previous system could not. The built-in reporting features are somewhat lacking, thus the need to look into third party solutions. What makes this so challenging is the CMS allows users to create "groups" of customers using a fairly ingenious query editor that is far more friendly than MS Query or the Crystal query builder. These groups are then used when running canned reports within the system. So from a data-gathering perspective, the CMS really delivers. But displaying the data, ugh! It falls apart, their report builder is horribly outdated. And so users will ask for dynamic reports in RS or Crystal based on the groups as created in the system. The groups information is stored in the database but not in a format that can be easily inserted into a SQL query.
It's a maddening process to try and divine the best combination of reporting needs for our situation. Reports heavily dependent upon using different groups as inputs will have to remain in the built-in reporting engine. Reports that will be for fixed groups can simply have those elements hardcoded into the report or prompted for upon execution. But sometimes we'll need to dump the data automatically into Excel, sometimes Excel can't handle it and something like Crystal or RS needed, and if RS can't yet duplicate a feature Crystal provides, then maybe it's too early to make the jump.
As someone more familiar with Crystal than RS, it's very informative to hear what a Crystal guy's gripes are because they are likely to be the same as mine. There's a wonderful book out there with a name like "Microsoft Servers for the Linux Administrator." As you can imagine from the title, it explains things for the Linux guy in terms he will be familiar with, more useful than a generalist book intended for the student entirely unfamiliar with the subject.
![[cheers]](/data/assets/smilies/cheers.gif "[cheers] [cheers]")
