A client that is evaluating Navision (Attain) wants to compare the pros and cos of Jet Reports against Crystal and FRx. If you have any input on where Jet is better or worse than the other reports, please respond to this topic. Thanxalot.[:p]
Where Jet is better… well… you can play with the data and also can get where the values are coming from like on navision standard flowfields…That’s a really attractive thing…
For me it was NO problem to sell JET to my customer. After a short, about 1.5h, demonstration they said: “Yes, that is what we want. Better than this other thing. I can’t remember the name” However, the customer still need to know where the data are “stored” in Navision to create their own reports. Personally, I prefer Jet, because it is really easy. I do not like the license splitting for JetDesigner (based on the name of the developer). But I think the do/need that to protect their investment. Regards Walter
On the Crystal side your only interface to Navision is via C/ODBC which doesn’t support outer joins. Jet Reports will take advantage of indexes and flowfields/flowfilters, etc. Crystal won’t. In Crystal’s favour is that Jet Reports isn’t the best for reports that will span multiple pages - sales invoices or purchase orders. Crystal Reports has the group headers and footers, custom formatting and page breaks, dynamic fonts, etc. etc. Jet Reports has turned Excel into a super-powerful data extraction tool. It hasn’t turned Excel into a report writer like Crystal. However, just try and consolidate non-related information into a chart with Crystal - hah! With JR it’s a breeze. I’ve worked with Crystal for about five years now and only find Jet Reports lacking in one or two areas. Jet Reports can handle almost 100% of your reporting needs. I prefer JR over Crystal for Navision reporting.
We use a lot of Jet Reports to do virtually everything we need. The ease with which Jet reaches into Navision to get any data field from any table (including all custom tables) is the biggest feature. On a few occassions, I have been excited that I found something Jet could not do only to call eSoftware Professionals and have them prove me wrong - Jet did that too! I am sorry that I cannot speak to Crystal Reports as that would be most beneficial, but if your client knows Excel, they already know Jet. Since you are nearby, if you wish to see some of the Jets we have flown, I would be more than happy to show you.
It depends on what you want to use it for. Crystal is great for quick reports, easily designed with grouping headers totals etc. If you don’t need outer joins or indexes and flowfields/flowfilters then Crystal is great. Also Crystal is much less expensive.
I’ve seen the demo of jet-reports and I was quite impressed. Can anyone tell me wat jet-reports will cost and if there is a reseller in The Netherlands? Thanks in advance.