SAP Crystal Server – Collaborative reports
October 06, 2017
SAP Crystal Server – Collaborative reports
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SAP Crystal Server
SAP Crystal Server is the perfect solution to share advanced BI reports across the organization, and all that from a single point of deploy. We can design simple yet powerful reports. As a senior consultant, I was responsible for making many proposals for customers to acquire SAP Crystal Server. It was successfully deployed in a company where Excel was the main source of reports, and where files needed to be shared across multiple users in order to make a final report.
- It is great to generate reports that can be shared with many users, who can also collaborate on them.
- The reports are easy to develop and deploy. There are lots of customizable options that can enrich your reports. The ability to generate scheduled reports is also a very good feature as it allows you to have complex and high demanding reports generated at a specific time.
- As an SAP product, it is very affordable, making it a good value for the money product. Other products with same features can be more expensive.
- Graph generation has some limitations that can be a bit frustrating sometimes.
- The customer expects to create business presentations from their reports, which could be a simpler process if they could export reports and graphs directly to PowerPoint.
- Customers always ask for a way to geta a feature like freeze panes in Excel. In large reports where scroll down is needed this feature is very important for the users.
- As a selling point of view, the UI of SAP Crystal Server could be improved with more modern layouts and themes. SAP have been improving this important part on products like SAP Fiori, but need to widen the range of products where layout is important.
- Microsot BI, Qlik Sense and SAP Crystal Reports
This is usually the easier software to have a consensus across different departments. The scheduled reports capabilities is also a very important feature when it comes to the time to decide. Despite some minor problems, SAP Crystal Server reports are usually very easy to interpret, especially for users used to Excel. After some experience users can independently create their own reports without external support.