Here shortly our company is upgrading from citrix meta frame to Win Terminal Server. From V9.1D to OE 10 and we will be using crystal reports.
I was wondering is there a huge difference between the two?
Is CR hard to get use to?
And any other information that i might find useful about this.
By the way have you considered Excel ? Yes, Excel.
There's some things you could do with Excel that you can't with CR.
One of the great things about it is that users take to it right away and even if you're not exactly sure on what they're after you could let them play and shape the report themselves.
Yeah we do a lot of our report workings in excel already we have report windows for our products and theres quite a bit some are created in pdfs some are excel some are tab delimited files all kinds of different things. Excel sheets are used a lot in my company so we will still be doing some work with excel also we are migrated i think from OE 10 toward asp.net over this year and we have so many products to roll over, it's going to be fun. Haha hint of sarcasm But i believe we still plan on using excel, i mean it's a pretty useful thing for reports specially doing weight breakdown reports and so on. Im in a trucking trans and logistix company btw.
I don't mean ActiveX or giving users CSV files. One of the things you can do, and especially if you're on a recent version 10.1x, is use a SQL query or stored procedure as the data source.
You could also define a directory of text files, CSV tab delimited etc. their fields, data types, column labels etc. like a database and tables. The directory can be local, on a network drive or even on an FTP site. This option can be useful if you're running an older version.
And create or allow users to create reports against these data source. The reports of course can also be refreshed and refreshed in a times interval etc. You could even generate offline OLAP cubes from Excel for very large datasets or time consuming queries.
Besides the things that can be done with spreadsheet reports one of the things Excel may be better at then other tools is cross tabular reports, pivot table and pivot charts.
You could also web enable your reports with it's data source as an interactive pivot table list etc. open them as a web page and incorporate them into your website. Although some of the features I've talked about require Office 2000 and above, you could use web enabled reports with IE5 and Windows 98.
And like I said, one of the best things with Excel is that you could give the users the query and a basic report and let them play and shape the reports themselves especially if you're not exactly sure on what they want. Alot of users feel very comfortable with Excel and take to these features fairly quick.
By the way ... is rearchitecting your new application and from scratch really as simple as you make it sound ?
From what I understand the company hired you and literally right out of a year or two of college and in about a year they expect to be a dot NET shop ?
How big is the application ?
Although I really wouldn't be surprised to hear things like that coming from management.
Is there something like an architecture, separating BL/UI etc., context, security what ever ? or is it just everything all together ?
I hope you don't take this the wrong way but even if Jesus was the developer I don't think it could be done in a year.
Well I'm an intern, and we are doing this architecture's it from scratch. We do have most of it in UI/BL . We have a senior Dev whos got years developing and we hired a .net seasoned Prof.
As for school i went to an advanced software dev school who's two main focuses were Java and asp.net. So i have a lot of training in .net more so than i do in progress.
And don't worry i didn't take it the wrong way. The reason i started this thread was just to see what i was getting myself into.
As an intern this company has already gave me great experience and this intergration will be another good exp for me.
i just didn't want to go into this this not knowing what to expect.
and our Products are quite intense but we all are going to tackle one at a time. until we get everything lifted then we are rolling it over.
Then again this has been in talks for the past couple years and now they are finally ready to do it.
Cool, sounds interesting
On the other hand we seem to be hemorrhaging users.