We have a developer with Crystal Reports experience, and some new reports that need to be written for a WinForm application accessing data from a SQL Server in the network.
An external consultant has made the comment that "Crystal Reports is dead" and to forget about it and install SQL Reporting Services instead.
Is this a reasonable proposition? Is the learning curve required for the developer to get the job done going to provide some significant improvement to the report generation process over Crystal?
As any other question like this, the answer will come with some level of passion.
In the company that I work for, we use the Business Objects BI suite. And Crystal Reports is part of this suite. And we use it a lot.
Business Objects was acquired by SAP, so it is the "dafault" choice for SAP users, that if it's not the 1st ERP vendor, it's the second, and, in this case, the number one is Oracle, and I doubt that Oracle will recomend SQL reporting services...
So, in my opinion, this external consultant is very biased and isn't seeing the big picture. Ok, the crystal usage among developers will decline, but claim that will be dead is a little bit to much.