Independent Data Consultancy
Mischievous update 5 years later! I get to mark my own homework. 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
In the past 6 months, I’ve worked with customers running every version of Crystal (Reports, Server & Enterprise) since version 7. Next week I’m running an XI R2 training course. Today, I helped an engineering company with a Crystal Reports 9 problem. As much as we’d all love to be running with the latest and […]
It’s long been a complaint that if you insert an image into Crystal Reports, the transparency is lost. It came up again in a support call from a customer. Glad to say I’ve found a solution – use Crystal Dashboard/Xcelsius. It works well too: Start up Crystal Dashboard, insert your various images, using the Excel […]