Looking for a Reporting Solution and Need Advice

Question

The company I work for is looking for a reporting solution with the following requirements:

1. Must be able to generate a set of reports nightly.
2. Must give the client the ability to create reports dynamically.
3. Must have robust export features.
4. Must have a viewer that can be displayed within a web application.

The company is looking at utilizing Crystal Reports and/or SSRS. Our company is mainly .NET developers using VS2k8 and SQL Server 2k8.

What are some of your experiences with each product and which one do you think would meet our requirements? It seems both products offer the requirements I mentioned, but they both feel robust in different areas.

Answer 1

From my own personal experience, SSRS is much simpler to set up and use - it also seems to be the way MS are going. In addition to that, if you're already using MS SQL server, you have no further license costs.

I haven't used the SSRS report builder heavily, but it certainly allows the creation of relatively simple reports by (somewhat skilled) end users.

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EDIT: Should note that my personal experience of crystal reports has been akin to repeatedly shooting myself in the foot...

Answer 2

If you plan on using .net and sql server why bother with Crystal Reports? It is definately the wrong route to take. Take advantage of Reporting Services as it is very very very easy to use, setup, and deploy.

The web placeholder for hte reports has automatic export to excel, pdf, rtf, html, etc. It is very robust and a very clean intuitive tool. The use of stored procedures within datasets makes it all the better.

We initially went the CR route and it was nothing but trouble and not as easy to build and deploy simple reports. We moved to RS and it is night and day...

Answer 3

Crystal and Reporting Services are both similarly capable tools despite what people say. Each tool can do most of what the other can with each one having particular areas in which it excels.

However, rather than installing Crystal you can try installing Reporting Services and just set fire to piles upon piles of used bank notes - the end result will be the same.

Answer 4

One downside to both Crystal Reports and SSRS is that report-viewer controls have COM dependencies. Moreover, much of the BusinessObjects .Net SDK has COM dependencies. Probably not a big deal if you plan to host the site internally, but worth mentioning.

I had a client whose hosting division wouldn't allow for COM installations on the shared server. Fortunately, I was able to use the BusinessObjects WebServices SDK in combination with BusinessObjects OpenDocument URL SDK to build a custom interface to BusinessObjects Enterprise.

Hope this helps.