Business Intelligence for the Living

Day of the Dead- or Dia de los Muertos- will be celebrated in just a few days on November 1st. I was reminded about this holiday when doing some product research using Copilot, the AI panel built into Microsoft’s Edge browser. Despite the current popularity of AI, Microsoft (rightly) feels the need to add the disclaimer “AI-generated content may be incorrect” at the bottom of the browser window.

Me: 

Does InfoBurst work with Crystal Reports?

Copilot: 

InfoBurst Publish supports scheduling, bursting, publishing, and delivering Crystal Reports content in a highly customizable and automated way. It allows you to:

• Schedule Crystal Reports using date/time, events, and macros.
• Burst reports using single-pass or multi-pass methods, personalizing content for each recipient.
• Deliver reports in various formats (PDF, Excel, CSV, etc.) to destinations like email, FTP, SharePoint, and cloud drives.
• Group content from multiple reports (including Crystal Reports) into a single file.
• Encrypt and compress report outputs for secure delivery.

To enable Crystal Reports processing, InfoBurst requires the BI Platform .NET SDK Runtime to be installed on the server[1].

You can learn more from the InfoBurst Publish page[2] or InfoSol’s InfoBurst documentation[3].

Would you like help setting up InfoBurst with Crystal Reports or exploring alternatives now that Crystal Reports is nearing end-of-life?

Me: 

Wait, what??? Crystal Reports is nearing end-of-life?!? 

The analytics community as a whole has a cognitive bias when it comes to the current status of SAP’s BusinessObjects and Crystal Reports product portfolio. I learned this recently when posting something about BusinessObjects on LinkedIn with a photo of a tombstone. Everyone assumes (incorrectly) that they’re either dead or dying.

But here is the current state of SAP’s BusinessObjects and Crystal Reports, as taken from SAP’s Product Availability Matrix (PAM):

SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.3 & SAP Crystal Reports 2020
General Availability 06/12/2020
End of Mainstream Maintenance 12/31/2026

SAP BusinessObjects BI 2025 & SAP Crystal Reports 2025
General Availability 03/12/2025
End of Mainstream Maintenance 12/31/2027

SAP BusinessObjects BI 2027 & SAP Crystal Reports 2027
General Availability estimated for Q1/2027
End of Mainstream Maintenance 12/31/2029

SAP BusinessObjects BI 2029 & SAP Crystal Reports 2029
General Availability estimated for Q1/2029
End of Mainstream Maintenance 12/31/2031

These are not decades-old software packages. Instead, these are fully modernized products offering the latest technology from SAP like UI5 and Datasphere connectivity. And they provide capability to modern cloud data sources like Databricks, Salesforce, and Snowflake, not to mention all of the data sources abstracted by the BusinessObjects semantic layer, the universe.

So, this November, feel free to celebrate dead products like Desktop Intelligence, Xcelsius, or even Crystal Reports Explorer. But SAP continues to provide analytics solutions for the living, not the dead.

How do you feel about SAP’s current roadmap for BusinessObjects and Crystal Reports? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.