Submission + - Convert Crystal Reports to SSRS 2005 with OSS?
edmicman writes: "We currently have a ton of web reports using Crystal 7. My employer wouldn't upgrade to later versions because of Crystal's steep licensing costs. We are now upgrading to the SQL Server 2005 platform from SQL Server 2000, and intend to phase out Crystal in favor of SQL's Reporting Services.
I was able to attend a small seminar put on by Microsoft showcasing the abilities of SSRS, and it looks very cool for what we want to do with it. Unfortunately, the seminar closed out with a presentation by the sponsoring partner as a sales pitch for their consulting services to convert our reports for us. With a hefty fee, for sure.
Looking into it some more, it seems there are a *lot* of 3rd parties selling expensive converters that will be run once, or consulting services with huge fees, all to do a one time conversion from Crystal to Reporting Services. Even Microsoft's webpage suggests a number of consulting firms. The seminar I attended showed the sponsors tool — a simple .NET application that you pointed out your existing reports, and it converted them as a batch. This makes me wonder — where is the open source utilities for something like this? I don't know how they do it, but I assume they are using the Crystal API that's included with Visual Studio .NET 2005. I'd love to make an open source app to do this, both to solve our problem and also to spite the big consulting firms out there essentially selling a "Y2K fix" that will be obsolete in a year or two. So are there any reasons why open source couldn't solve this problem?"
I was able to attend a small seminar put on by Microsoft showcasing the abilities of SSRS, and it looks very cool for what we want to do with it. Unfortunately, the seminar closed out with a presentation by the sponsoring partner as a sales pitch for their consulting services to convert our reports for us. With a hefty fee, for sure.
Looking into it some more, it seems there are a *lot* of 3rd parties selling expensive converters that will be run once, or consulting services with huge fees, all to do a one time conversion from Crystal to Reporting Services. Even Microsoft's webpage suggests a number of consulting firms. The seminar I attended showed the sponsors tool — a simple
