Good ways to use Crystal Reports with Salesforce?

Question

Does anyone know good ways/tools/approaches for using Crystal Reports with Salesforce.com?

I know that Crystal Reports for Salesforce exists but I'm wondering what other possibilities there are...

Answer 1

It looks like your data is tied up with salesforce.com if you can export data you could use crystal reports independent of salesforce.com.

Other links on exporting data:

• http://sfdc.arrowpointe.com/2008/04/28/do-you-backup-your-salesforce-data/
• http://ideas.salesforce.com/article/show/97976/Export_All_via_Data_Loader
• http://ideas.salesforce.com/article/show/23579/Scheduled_Data_Export_to_backup_database

Answer 2

Our solution may not work for you, but we've decided to host our reports on an external reportserver which is written in c# and exposes a SOAP based web service because the Crystal Reports for Salesforce solution you mentioned didn't offer us the flexibility we needed.

The process is essentially:

1. Salesforce makes a soap based call to the report server
2. Report server collates data from Salesforce via the Salesforce Soap API
3. Report server renders the report and returns it to salesforce

Answer 3

To answer my own question, we eventually decided to set up a local read-only copy of the Salesforce database in MS Sql Server, and develop reports based on that. This allowed the report-writing people to use all the familiar SQL tools they know, without the restrictions on what-can-be-joined-to-what that the native Salesforce database has.

We're using a piece of software called DBAmp to do this - It makes Salesforce appear in SQL Server as a 'linked server', and provides stored procedures you can use to download entire Salesforce tables, or just download changes to a Salesforce table since the last time. This makes it very easy to set up a local copy of the data that gets updated every night.