Hi All,

How is Cognos different from Crystal Reports?

Our application needs reporting solutions with following requirements:

1) All reports will be viewed in browser in HTML format
2) Reports needs pagination features.
3) Want to avoid activex/java components which might create problems
during the installation on client-side browser.
4) Apart from on-screen view with pagination features, we also need
Printable View from browser.
5) Reports need export capabilities - XLS, PDF etc...
6) Some reports will have Graphs
7) Some reports will be cross-tab reports.
8) Application will be deployed on Sun Solaris and will be on J2EE
enviroment using IBM Webspere server.

Which is the best option for me? Cognos or Crystal Reports? Last but
not the least, the software vendor should have proper
documentation/support for the product

Regards,
Kamlesh

Hi Kamlesh,

Cognos ReportNet (CRN) and Crystal Reports/Enterprise (CE) have further
strenghts and weaknesses which need to be considered - according to your
users' requirements. Please find my comments in + and - inline:

"Kamlesh" <kamlesh2000 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:2644c0f6.0405102132.23c981ee (AT) posting (DOT) google.com...



printer support)




Both provide good documentation. CRN is a 1.2 release , CR/CE a mature
product. CR/CE comes from the focus on production reporting though (serial
letters, invoices) and has limited capabilities for
Business-Intelligence-Reporting. CRN is a good product for BI-Reporting and
does also a good job for production reporting but doesn't yet provide the
same (outstanding) functionality for the latter. CRN in contrast offers good
user interfaces (fully web enabled by means of DHTML) while CR/CE was
designed to integrate perfectly in other environments (applications,
portals, etc.). This is done by coding. An interesting point for us was that
the integration of CRN into SAP BW is broader than CR/CE's.

Do a proof of concept with both tools and try to implement some sample
reports. You will soon realize which tool is the appropriate for you.

Kind regards,

Joerg