Hi. I'm a product manager on the Crystal Reports team. Over the last 2 years, I've been spending most of my time managing the requirements and feature set for our SAP BW integration story with the Crystal Reports for Enterprise report designer. Slowly that has expanded to encompass our integration and connectivity with SAP ERP and all integration with the Dimensional Semantic Layer (DSL) and Query Panel (QP). This has grown since to also include our traditional meat-and-potatoes direct to data access story. In essence, you can call me the Product Manager for Data Access in Crystal Reports for Enterprise.
There are lots of changes and differences between CR 2011 and CR for Enterprise especially around the topic of data access. Namely:
- Access to SAP BW is via the BW Bex query. It utilizes the DSL which talks to SAP BW via the BICS API. MDX access is a thing of the past and only useable from CR 2011
- Access to next generation .UNX universes also via the DSL. The older legacy .UNV universes are only accessible via CR 2011, and these universes must be upgraded in order to be used by CREnt.
- Access to direct to data has also changed - in CR 2011, we provided our own data access stack (recall the crdb*.dll data drivers). In CREnt, we now use the Connection Server (CS) as our data access stack similar to how our DSL-based data access methods above also use CS. To put it simply, we take out the DSL and use the connections to access datasources directly.
All of these changes will require lots of re-education for the CR user moving away from CR 2011, especially when it comes time to consider the migration costs. I'm hoping to use this space to build a following of CR enthusiasts for dialogue/feedback, & share some of my product ideas/thoughts along the way.
