Crystal Reports XI Official Guide

BI products like those distributed by Business Objects (Crystal Reports, Crystal Reports Server, BusinessObjects Enterprise, OLAP Intelligence, and WebIntelligence) are deployed and used in about as many different ways as there are product implementationsand there are millions. However, as you become exposed to a broad swath of BI clients and their implementations, you can find definite themes to their deployments. Taking a step back, distinctive drivers to worldwide BI product adoption become evident and a few of the most common are discussed in the following sections.

Custom Information Delivery Applications

Despite the increasing functionality of turnkey software and Web applications available today, corporations of all sizes still regularly look to custom developed applications to provide them with unique competitive advantage and to meet their proprietary business requirements. These applications run the gamut in size from small business applications through large departmental applications to enterprise intranet and extranet applications. The key component of these custom projects is the integration of BI functionality, such as formatted reporting, ad hoc query, self-service Web reporting, and/or analytic capabilities, within an internally developed application. Table 0.1 highlights some typical examples of custom applications using the Business Objects suite of products to help deliver custom applications.

Table 0.1. Sample Custom Information Delivery Applications

Application

Application Audience

Product Usage

Small retail chain's internal Java-based sales metrics application

Approximately 20 sales employees and managers

Using Crystal Reports Java Engine, the developer provides the sales team with Web access to on-demand metrics reports built into the intranet application.

Large portfolio management firm's client extranet application

10,000+ high value customers of firm

Using BusinessObjects Enterprise, the developer provides access to the scalable reporting infrastructure and facilitates those customers getting online Web access to their portfolio reports.

Asset management firm's report batch of institution scheduling application

50,000+ clients

Using the BusinessObjects RAS server and scheduling engine, the developer's applition dynamically creates tens of thousands of customized reports daily and automatically emails them to the appropriate clients in PDF and XLS formats.

A key strength of the Business Objects suite of products is that it lends itself readily to integration into custom applications. From the inclusion of basic formatted reports within your Java/J2EE or .NET applications through the inclusion of rich ad hoc query and self-service reporting functionality in proprietary information product applications to provision of large-scale enterprise BI analytics, scheduling, and security functionality in a globally deployed application, the Business Objects suite of products can meet your requirements. Table 0.2 provides a jump-point for those looking for each type of application integration covered in this book.

Table 0.2. Custom Application Chapters Overview

Development Environment

Functionality Required

Section and Chapters

Java/J2EE

Pre-built reports included in custom Java application

Part VI, Chapter 28

.NET

Pre-built reports included in custom .NET application

Part VI, Chapters 29

Java/J2EE/.NET

All of the above and self service or ad hoc report creation in custom application

Part VII, Chapters 34 and 35

Java/J2EE/.NET

All of the above and scheduling, alerting, scalability, enterprise security, analytics, and more in a custom application

Part VII, Chapters 3133

Enterprise BI Initiatives

With the proliferation of BI tools and the acceleration of product adoption around the globe, there has been concurrent pressure for the involved companies to standardize on a single set of products and toolseffectively a BI infrastructure or platform. The main arguments for such standardization include the following:

  • Reduced total cost of product ownership

  • Creation of Enterprise centers of excellence

  • Reduced vendor relationships

  • Movement toward a BI infrastructure/platform

As BI products have matured from different areas of historical strength and their marketplace acceptance has grown, end-user organizations have found themselves with disparate and incompatible BI tools and products across or even within the same departments in their organization. To eliminate the costliness of managing such a broad set of tools, many firms are now moving to adopt a single BI platform like BusinessObjects Enterprise (or Crystal Reports Server for smaller businesses). The infrastructure of BusinessObjects Enterprise provides a single architecture to manage all the content and tools required to serve an organization's structured information delivery requirements. Figure 0.2 shows an end-user map of a typical organization. As you can imagine, each of the different types of end-users in a company requires different types of tools to be productive. A common infrastructure or centrally managed center of excellence such as BusinessObjects Enterprise that can meet all the varying end-user and IT requirements has clear organizational benefits.

Figure 0.2. Organizational end-user requirements map from Business Objects.

Details of the breakdown of this book are included later in this introduction but to jumpstart your learning on this type of BI application, Table 0.3 can point you to the sections and chapters of particular relevance now.

Table 0.3. Enterprise Business Intelligence Chapter Overview

Enterprise Business Intelligence Focus

Section and Chapters

Out-of-the-box product using BusinessObjects Enterprise

Part V, Chapters 23 and 24

Out-of-the-box product using Crystal Reports Server for small and medium-sized businesses

Part V, Chapters 22 and 24

Setting up and administering BusinessObjects Enterprise or Crystal Reports Server

Part V, Chapters 2527

Integrating BusinessObjects Enterprise or Crystal Reports Server functionality into applications

Part VII, Chapters 3034

Enterprise Application Extension

In the past two decades, large firms have spent millions of dollars on enterprise applications including ERP and CRM applications such as SAP, Oracle/PeopleSoft, and Siebel. These large organizations are now looking for ways to extract analytic value from these operational data stores to facilitate organizational planning and forecasting through BI products.

The Business Objects suite of products includes a variety of specialized drivers that provide direct connectivity into these enterprise applications. It is important to note that these drivers are provided for use with the BusinessObjects Enterprise infrastructure and are usually released 36 months after the product suite is released. Chapter 15 introduces the drivers that were available at the time of publishing for this book for those who have an immediate interest in this topic.

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