Hi All,

I'm a webfocus developer(mostly hand code..not much GUI) that is taking over the maintenance of a mail/merge process that is currently in Crystal. I'd rather do this with webfocus but am concerned about re-creating all the formatting that is already setup in the document that is currently produced. Are there any users out there that use both webfocus and crystal that can share pros and cons of these two different reporting tools?

Thanks in advance.
Jim

The only pros I can think of CR is that it is almost free and a lot of people think to know how to use it.
I have been looking at some of these reports, and what I think you can do is use the sql script for the first selection of the data.
The lay-out work must be done again but use the GUI for that part, it will give a big help.
I did the same with several reports we have made with Access.
success!

I've been doing Crystal (v 8.0) to WebFOCUS conversions for the last year. I think it's really just a preference. I had some pretty gnarly financial reports with borders and such and had to rewrite some of the stored procedures due to the way the data was formatted and fed to Crystal.

The old adage "if it's not broken don't fix it" comes to mind.

Thanks for the comments. I would like to hear more if onyone else would like to add anything.

RickW,
You say you have been converting from Crystal to WF. Is that because of your preference? What is mostly used in your company?
I would prefer to use WF because that is what I know(except I haven't dug into the GUI yet), but Crystal is scattered around all over in our company and only a few people have access to WF.
What's the best way to get started using the GUI more to develope reports. Are there any resourses that can kick-start someone to teach themselves?

Jim

The company i work for decided to standardize the entire reporting environment with WebFOCUS.

I haven't used the WF GUI too much at all (old timer coder). I was also having issues with 5.2.8 and the GUI not recognizing HOLD files that I wanted to report from - so that was another excuse to hand code it.

7.6.x has some pretty cool Advanced Graph stuff and the Coordinated PDFs look pretty sweet too.

RickW,

Did the decision to standardize on WebFocus go over well? Do you have a lot of WF users or are most of your rpts/apps developed by only a few? What did your company do for training?

Jim

Several years prior, they tried COGNOS and it didn't work out (don't remember why at the moment - I'll ask Carol D. if she want's to comment on this). There was also a relatively high familiarity with the FOCUS language so that probably helped the decision.

I would say that there's a fairly high degree of satisfaction with the product from an IT area and end-user perspective.

We have a good number of end-users developing their own reports I think many of them may not be using the GUI.

For training, I think we had IBI come in a few times, user group meetings, and a few even got to go to FUSE as well.

We tried COGNOS before WebFOCUS. We get lots of outside files that need to be joined in reports. COGNOS was too slow for us using UNIONS, so we switched to WebFOCUS which has powerful joining capabilities. WebFOCUS has allowed us to eliminate almost all of our mainframe processing.

Our users are mostly hand coding, some have tried the GUI and found limitations or had it clobber the code. I've heard the GUI is getting better but I'm an old time coder too.

WebFOCUS has been very successful in the hands of our end users and in systems. We used IBI for our training, however, we customized the class to teach more of the core language.

Good Luck!