Wanting to use Crystal Reports

Are you thinking Lawson Business Intelligence or stand alone Crystal? LBI may take care of some of your DBA's concerns. If you used LBI and dashboards, users could run their own reports. I used to work for a company that used a Hyperion reporting tool to do ad-hoc queries directly from the tables with little to no system impact.

This would be stand along Crystal Reporting.

I would be creating the crystal reports, the users would not. Someone had mentioned if I create the report, the users could use the report I had created and run it when they wanted the data. Or would I have to run it each time they wanted the data? Setup time - security - performance are the concerns as well.

Ok, let me see if I can provide some help to you.
First, if you use an OLE DB connection from Crystal Reports to the Lawson tables, it follows Lawson security (at least it follows LAUA security.. not sure about the new Lawson Security roles). Using OLEDB we have found here is a SIGNIFICANT drain on resources. So we don't use that much. Reports that run in minutes using ODBC connections take hours using OLEDB. Just showing you what is available.
Secondly, there is a Lawson utility that will build the SQL statements for any LAUA security class to grant/revoke, etc. (Again, not sure about the new Lawson Security roles).
Not knowing which DBMS you are on, or what version, or what version of Lawson, I'll use our Oracle9i example here. (Other versions of the utility exist for other DBMS) Our DBA runs a
[b]bldora9sec -c [/b] and redirects the output to a sql file via [b]> sec-class.sql[\b]

This sql file will mimic what is contained in the Lawson LAUA security class and allow you to create a role file from it to assign to the users that are members of that security class so that they can use ODBC connections to the database. These ODBC connections are much faster than using OLEDB connections.

There is an alternative for those of us on LSF9, too, but you cannot take just one security class. It builds the sql statement for all security classes, and you'd have to go in and strip out what you needed.
[b]bldora10sec -u (username) -p (password) (productline name) > (output file name)[\b]

As far as the added load to the system, it all depends upon what you are requiring of the users, and how powerful your servers are, you may just have to trial-and-error it like we have had to do here. I'd say, that we haven't noticed a great deal of drain except for the very early mornings here. (and we are utilizing LBI - to a great extent).

Hope this helps you decide which way to go.

Cheers,
-Greg Moeller

You may want to investigate Lawson Add-Ins that allow for more simplistic queries of the database using MS Office. Just depends on what your users require of you, or themselves.

Sorry, I didnt mention what versions we are on. 8.0 apps and env. Oracle 10g. AIX 5.2 server. Using LAUA. Thanks Greg, I will take this info and bring it to our team. Good idea aobut Add-ins! I do currently use Addin for data requests I get from our users. Nice tool for small amounts of data. For larger reports, over 60,000 records, as you know it has it's limitations, unfortunately.

We use Crystal Enterprise (CE for short) - where we (HRIS) develop the reports, and post into CE. CE is linked through Lawson, and the CE set up gives users access to specific folders where they find their OWN reports. They then run them on demand.

The real advantages to CE are: #1 each user does NOT have to have a Crystal install on their desktop.
#2 performance is better as the bulk of the report is run on the CE server
#3 reports can be scheduled to run (during off hours to reduce server strain) and automatically delivered to the user as an e-mail attachment in .xls or .pdf form.

CE is not cheap, but using it has many rewards.

Hope this helps.

Joel

LBI is built similarly to CE - most of the advantages are exactly the same.
Sounds as if the cost is about the same as well, unfortunately.

Monica,

Please see https://www.lawsonguru.co...eportingCrystal.aspx for a number of articles I have written, which explain the use of Lawson OLEDB vs. native database providers as data sources for Crystal reports. In a nutshell, it really comes down to security vs. performance.

How big is your organization?  That tends to also be a factor, as smaller organizations can usally not justify the expense of purchasing/maintaining CE or LBI, and there are some "light-weight" ways of deploying Crystal reports that don't require the infrastructure investment.

Thanks so much for all your input I really appreciate your feed back! We are a fairly large Health Care organization with 3 hospitals, 9 clinics and many specialty centers such as senior community, heart center, sleep centers etc. I would like to put LBI on our list of applications to utilize sometime in the next few years. But, really don't see it happening before 2010. We have the upgrade coming up the end of this year along with other Lawson products such as MSCM, Contract Management. So unfortunately we have our calendar filled thru 2010. I think this would be a good time to put a bug in my directors ear about LBI and its capabilities.

We are a fairly large Health Care organization with 4 hospitals, several clinics, sounds pretty similar to you, Monica. To tell you the truth, when we first implemented LBI, I figured it would barely be used, but since it has been integrated with Lawson Portal, it has grown and grown by leaps and bounds, almost exponentially.
We are constantly receiving requests for more and more reports to be put out there, or delivered to email. You do sound busy, however, and LBI is not a small project to be leaped into lightly. You will need training! And the more you can get, the better. Just do it slowly... you can't possibly take a 3 day training class and learn all of the different pieces to LBI. In fact, I'm the main supporter of LBI, and have been for over a year now, and I'm still learning!

I really have not used lawson.guru much in the past. I can see this site being very resourceful. A lot of good networking and information being provided here. I will have to keep this site up on my computer throughout the day. Too bad I am not the end decision maker, we would be there like yesterday. ( LBI ) CE also sonds like a great option, I will keep this on my wish list. I just have to start small and persuade the admin to allow me to use the stand alone crystal reports first, then go for the biggies. Thanks again, and have a good weekend!

The benefits of using stand-alone CR first, is that you will already have the reports written. They can all then be used in conjunction with LBI and split apart, or published to the dashboards, etc. I think you are doing the correct thing first!

Greg, John, and others have already covered quite a bit.  I would add is that there is a learning curve with report development.  Learning how to use a tool like Crystal is one thing, but learning where the data resides (as well as table relationships) can present a challenge.  But I think you are going down the right path.  Crystal does a good job of presenting the data and is the industry standard for reporting.

If you decide to go this direction and wait on a deployment/delivery system for your reports like LBI or CE, I would recommend that you don't put off what LBI can do for you.  There are some tremendous efficiences that can be gained on the report development (and maintenance for that matter) side of things, especially in regards to bursting (data level security).  Not to mention the benefits of automated distribution, among others.  In addition, you can publish your COBOL/Backoffice reports directly to LBI...and you can apply bursting to some off these reports with the delivered product (others may require custom tags to burst).  I could go on, but I'll restrain myself.

FYI - CE is now know as Business Objects Enterprise (aka BOE or BOXI, at least until SAP decides to rebrand it).  What Joel is referring to is something Lawson packaged as "Enterprise Reporting", which was essentially CE stand-alone but was integrated (somewhat) into Portal.  You would actually purchase CE from Lawson with this package.  Lawson isn't going to sell you this product anymore - LBI (and it's previous incarnation known as LRS) replaced this product.  Having said that, you can still purchase CE/BOE from Business Objects/SAP.

Chris Martin
Technical Consultant - Business Intelligence
cjmart@swbell.net
http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisjmartin

Thanks for the added info Chris. I have been working with Lawson applications for 10 years. So I am very familiar with the tables, relationships etc., which is a good thing. The learning curve for me will be and is what is currently availble out there for reporting purposes that I am able to use more effectively for my end users, other than COBOL. Such as learning more about LBI, crystal reporting etc, and convincing my I.S. leadership that these are the most efficient tools to use going forward.

https://www.lawsonguru.co...eportingCrystal.aspx

Hi John- - i tried to access the information on this link you provided, but unfortunately the link does not appear to be working - appreciate your help.. thanks

Server Error in '/' Application.
The resource cannot be found.

www.lawsonguru.com/Apps/BPMEPMLBI/E...ystal.aspx

https://www.lawsonguru.co...orting(Crystal).aspx

You probably decided how you wanted to move forward already but I wanted to add that since you have Oracle 10 your DBA can set resource limits for the DB users so they will not be able to take down the system. I have used standalone Crystal Reports with Lawson very successfully before. I had to setup database accounts for each user that needed access and determine which tables they needed depending on the reports they were running. I was heavily involved in designing the reports to make sure they were linked properly and would not hog resources and then we published them using an internal web deployment so the users could save the report address in IE as a favorite and refresh and export whenever they wanted. We had begun looking at LBI but haven't gotten there yet. I hope this helps if anyone else is considering using Crystal.