Question : MS Reporting services vs Business Objects

Hi,

We have Business Objects 5.x . We are planning to migrate the
existing Business Object based reporting to MS SQL server reporting services. We are looking for the advantages and disadvantages of moving from Business Objects to Reporting services.

Thanks for your time in advance.
GVS

Answer : MS Reporting services vs Business Objects

Ok, my two cents as a BO Guy.

I've not had a lot of experience with the ms product yet.

I agree with most of the previous posts here.  My Company is not investing in ms reporting services yet because it's just too early.  The other thing that bugs me is that Microsoft, over and over, has proved that it will, at some point, make decisions that funnel it's customers into it's product line (stong integration with sql server, etc.).  I've worked with Pro-Clarity a bit, which I believe originated as an ms product (not now though).  It works only with ms databases.  While ms is no doubt the king of the hill, it's just not good business to funnel yourself that way.

BO, while it certainly has it's quirks, is mature at this point.  Integration into existing is architectures, with disparate dbms's is it's lifeblood.  It's the major thing that can set it apart from the competition.  They have no investment in tying themselves to any one dbms (or architecture).  One could say that, with the acquistition of Crystal, that's changed, but I've seen BO's integration roadmap, and it appears that connectivity, with equal integratioin capabilities, across disparate architectures will continue to be it's focus.  PDF rendering is also done well.

Chris's point about some limitation regarding customization of look and feel is well taken.  BO also has some limitation in regards to making it look "exactly like it looked" when the mainframe pumped it out 10 years ago.  But this is the tradeoff for quick development time.  Any product, BO, MS, Cognos, etc.  can be customized to do exactly what you want IF you're willing to spend the time diddling with the sdk.  It's a cost vs. value issue.

Sorry for the long winded comment.  I just find these types of threads interesting.

-John

Interesting comments from chrismc.  I can tell you that in BO's Version 6.x products, the con's mentioned regarding msrs don't exist in current bo product.  Rendering to Excel is particularly good in BO.  I was surprised.  Not only did reports render well, charts and graphs were rendered with the underlying data table (BO result set) set up on a separate worksheet so that the chart and data could be manipulated within Excel.  Cool, not just a picture of a report.