A year and a half ago, I saw a demo of Microsoft’s Reporting Services and said, “Crystal Reports will be a memory in 10 years”, and I still think I'm going to be correct.
*However*
Crystal doesn't have much in the way of worries right now. For the last couple of weeks, I'm working with SSRS for the first time, and WOW does it suck. Don't get me wrong, the infrastructure is fantastic. Moving a report from drawing board to server is simply a right click and a “deploy“ away. That is WOW great and amazing.
Being on the report creation side is a different matter. Crystal has some serious problem, but I can make a report sing from within the IDE. Crystal has had a WYSIWYG interface for 10 years, you know, where you look at the report output, and adjust the width of the field while looking at live data. Dragging fields around is a breeze and making summaries happen is such a no brainer I never had to think about it.
Now I'm sure that some of this frustration is just the natural learning curve of the product, but duh-ang people, couldn't you have hired a couple of report writers in to use your tool and tell what's good and what sucks? If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times, “When the CEO get's on the plane all he has are your reports. At that moment, your reports ARE your program, so don't leave they're design and creation until the very last second.”
With Crystal Reports, if an executive asks for a report tweak, I can dive into any report, make that tweak, run the report, and leave his office. With SSRS, the way it is now, I'm going to have to write up a change request, and send the new output through a QA cycle, “you'll see your changes is a week, no problem”.