On a technical level, is it even possible for IFS to remove Crystal?

After all, Crystal is just a web service listening to incoming requests (from IFS) and responding with a PDF file.  How can they block the existing technology?

It’s one thing to de-support a product, but it’s quite another thing to actively switch it off!!

Can someone clarify?

Has there been any updates on this topic? We are next heading to IFS 25R1 and this is a major concern when the time for 25/R2 rolls around.

Report designer is terrible. My legs can walk me forty miles also, but no one would recommend my legs as a replacement for a car.  It is a weak, user-unfriendly tool. 

Report studio seems to have a bunch of bugs and has limited functionality compared to Crystal.

Converting these reports also will solve 0.00 issues at our company. We will get the same report, we have today after spending 100s of hours converting them. 

Has anyone tried using the report rendering engine integration delivered in 25R1 with Crystal Report? 

So with this in mind are IFS offering a tool to convert all of our Crystal Reports (over 250) to another format or do we have to spend time and money developing them all again from scratch ?
All this because of a licencing matter, out of our control…. not much thought again has been given to the end customers.

Maybe IFS is offering to discount the annual license fees, for all of the time spent converting Crystal reports to other formats? Send the hours to IFS, and deduct from the bill? Is that how it works?

Allow me to try and clarify, please.

We’re not blocking anything. What we are doing in the 25R1 release (25R2 for upgrading customers) is discontinuing /sunsetting a Crystal Reports specific integration we built decades ago. This integration has simply reached end of life.

There’s always been two parts of this integration, one for operation reports (things like invoices, purchase orders and similar, reports that are part of and triggered in a standard business flow of IFS Applications / Cloud) and another one focused on what we refer to as ad-hoc reporting or quick reports (more analytical reports, things like sales statistics and similar). Any Crystal Report based operational report layouts would be based on data assembled in a format (a tabular result set) no longer used by any of our other reporting solutions, hence dated and creates an additional maintenance overhead on top of the one for the integration itself.

After careful consideration we’ve decided to stop providing this vendor specific (Crystal Reports) integration (which had reached end-of-life from a technical standpoint) and rather provide a vendor agnostic reporting engine integration capability, in addition to our out of the box reporting solutions (out of which Report Studio is the one we will focus moving forward). This vendor agnostic reporting engine integration capability is provided through the External Reports Gateway. As this is vendor agnostic it actually requires you to implement your own integration to your preferred reporting tool. Compared to using the previous out of the box Crystal Reports this is an additional step. On the other hand it caters to a much wider audience, since it can be used to integrate any tool (which of course include Crystal Reports for someone that would like to use that).

The two (the previous Crystal Reports specific and the new vendor agnostic approach) are technically different, which likely doesn’t allow you to just reuse existing Crystal Reports layouts/reports even if you implement a Crystal Reports specific integration using the External Reports Gateway, but it might be possible to reuse quite a bit of the layout and limit the efforts to adjusting to the new XML-based data source format. We’re only providing the integration point, not the actual vendor specific integrations one might decide to implement, so it all depends on how you would chose to integrate with Crystal Reports in this example.

So quite the contrary to try and block something, we’re actually opening up for being able to integrate additional reporting tools in a better way. Crystal Reports is such a tool, but there are also multiple other ones.

Just as you say, we’ve de-supported a certain part of our product. This means we no longer include and ship it in newer version (Release Updates) of the product. To continue to include de-supported things in a new version is not really feasible and not something you would see anyone doing. Already shipped product is not affected and supported throughout its lifecycle, so for an upgrading customer, that had Crystal Reports since earlier, you could go to 25R1 (the last version that contained the vendor specific Crystal Reports integration) and be supported until early 2027 when this version goes out of support. Combined with the deprecation notice period of a year this allows a total of 3 years to adapt to transition from earlier out of the box Crystal Reports integration to something else (which may very well be Crystal Reports through the External Reports Gateway if Crystal Reports is the preference).

I hope this helps sort out any misconception of us trying to block any Crystal Reports usage, as that’s not the case at all.

Thank you,

The solutions offered though are a backward step and not fit for purpose.
This still does nothing to assist businesses in having to write new reports in the solutions offered from scratch at cost and in time.

“which had reached end-of-life from a technical standpoint.”

Why? This just sounds like a standard techno gibberish answer to obscure the real motivation.

We understand there are options.  But all of these options have costs associated with them, and as far as I know IFS has not offered to help absorb these costs.