Like most people, when I heard that SAP Anywhere was being ‘sunset’ in March, my first though was ‘What’s SAP Anywhere?’. Yes, I thought it was something to do with Sybase SQL Anywhere, but it turned out to be the world’s most obscure cloud accounts package. Next, there was the announcement that SAP Dashboard (aka […]
Category: Crystal Dashboard
Metabase – easy, open source way to ask questions and learn from data.
After 7 months of working with Metabase Dashboards at customer sites, I though it was about time I started talking about it! Our product page is here, the product showcase will be along once time permits. With the demise of Crystal Dashboard (Xcelsius), I spent some time looking at alternative products. The obvious first choice […]
Farewell Xcelsius/BOB Dashboards/Crystal Dashboards
It started of simply enough – a Flash front-end for Excel. The clever bit was the interaction between the spreadsheet and the widgets. Great for budgeting and what-if analysis. Then some server-side stuff was added, so the licensing became complicated. It seemed to change slightly with every release. Sometimes it appeared that only the name […]
Crystal Dashboard in a Flash-free world
Hint: It involves HTML5! I first used Crystal Dashboard (then known as Xcelsius) in 2004 or 2005. Back then, the fact that the dashboards were deployed as Flash files was a selling point. Flash was available on over 90% of clients and Adobe had great plans for further developing the platform. Then, it all changed. […]
Crystal Server 2016 Licensing – All change!
This all happened 6 weeks ago, but with holidays and work commitments, it’s taken until now for me to write. I’d hoped SAP would produce a nice simple guide that I could just link to, but that would be too easy. The only other mention I’ve seen is a rather fanciful interpretation by another reseller […]
Crystal Dashboard and Excel 2016 or Office 365 – prerequisites.
Annoying isn’t it? Excel 2016 is installed (or Office 365), but that doesn’t count as 2007 or higher. Jokes about Office upgrades aside, this shouldn’t be a problem, but you can’t install. One solution is to uninstall Office 2016, install Office 2013, then install Office 2016 again. Not great, especially as Office 2013 takes up […]
SAP BI 4.2/Edge 4.2 released
Short and sweet! If you have current maintenance for SAP BI4.2 or Edge 4.2, you will now be able to download the new release. You’ll need a new licence key, request through the normal SAP site. Our test server should be available within the next few days and we’ll be seeing how smoothly in-place upgrades […]
Crystal Dashboard licensing – sanity at last!
Crystal Dashboard’s a great product that’s always been made difficult to sell by its complex licensing model. It didn’t help having one product with three names (Crystal Dashboard, BusinessObjects Dashboard & Xcelsius), but three different versions was just too much. When you create a Dashboard, the data can either be in an embedded spreadsheet or […]
SAP BI4.2/Crystal Server 2016 – What’s New
Before you get excited, this hasn’t been released yet. SAP are promising 1st half of 2016, so somewhere between New Year and your summer holiday. It still makes an interesting read to see both specific features and general direction of the products. I’ve mentioned Crystal Server 2016 in here, but the name’s not official yet. […]
£3400 of software for £850! SAP Edge BI now available as a single user licence.
Changes to software licensing always make me groan – simplification normally means the price has increased. Anything else normally means it’s become more complex. Edge BI is nice and simple – named or concurrent licences. You then get the kitchen sink of software thrown at you! Crystal Reports, Crystal Reports for Enterprise, Crystal Dashboard, Web Intelligence, Lumira […]