Hi, has anyone experience with an external report writer? I have used Actuate to connect to a Progress-db to overcome the limits of this internal Rport writer. Has anybody done this for NF already and with which software?
Most people who use external report writers with Navision use crystal reports. You can get some very good (but some times slow) results with it. Paul Baxter
Hi, We have implemented lots of external report writers. Crystal Reports is slow. We have used Navision Financials/ATtain with Cognos, Adaytum, Business Objects, Microstrategy and CA’s Business Intelligence suite. We have created data dictionaries for these as well as some c/side code for fast data access. You may also want to try SQL OLAP reporting if the installation is on SQL servers. If you want more info, feel free to contact me. Alex alexander.pappas@astongroup.com
Have you checked out www.iQ4bis.com? "Our BI product suite encompasses a complete end-to-end solution for mid-market enterprises by offering a data warehousing solution on the back end (DataServer) to build a centralized repository and a web-based analytics application on the front end (Analysis Web) to “slice and dice” your data. We offer ERP-specific solutions with connectors to your various data sources to accelerate the implementation process.
iQ4bis offers a BI product suite targeted to the Managers in mid-market organizations who typically do not have the resources to deploy expensive and complex BI solutions which invariably come with long implementations, interminable training sessions, a requirement for dedicated IT staff to maintain the application."
Can’t agree that Crystal is slow - maybe with native base + NODBC it really is, but we use Crystal with SQL server, for complicated reports SQL Stored procedures are used, and performance is excellent… Can’t compare with NAV native reporting, where some reports needed 4 days to complete 
Now there is just another alternative for SQL users - SQL Reporting Services, which should outperform Crystal+SQL+SP.
And finally - both mentioned solutions may be in advance prepared by IT pros in such a way, that end users can modify and even create reports as needed without deep knowledge of reporting technologies and with NO knowledge at all of NAV internal data structures.
Alex, do you ever experience to use Next Report 2.3 or other version , LogiReport , and Jasper Report 3.??
Those are all, I think, is a simple report writer, but I found difficulties to get it connected to N/ODBC as a datasource.
What do you think? Is there anyone knows on this issue? Please share.
Thank you.